Generations of First Peoples have questioned and are questioning the ethics of storing, accessing and sharing images within the archive.

Will new technologies threaten or help protect our images and our peoples, if we don’t have ownership or control over what lives in the archive? What about our cultural and intellectual property? What impacts do contemporary practices have on people, culture and land?

Wiradjuri artist and architect Joel Sherwood Spring considers these questions and confronts the social and environmental ethics of new technologies in the construction, storage and sharing of our images. His new commission for ACMI, DIGGERMODE (2022), comprises an immersive multi-channel installation.

"State acts of surveillance, recording and archiving had the power to place our family stories in the public domain, or obliterate stories within a broader history of erasure; filed away, silent and hidden until bidden. But our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep…”

Natalie Harkin (1)

Using an online artificial intelligence (AI) text-to-image generator, Sherwood Spring has created landscapes in the style of Albert Namatjira paintings, which include imagery of the Country being extracted, perhaps as a foreshadowing or warning of our potential future.

Sherwood Spring has trained the neural pathways of another AI, who interacts in first person with the artist throughout the work when asked questions like, “Who’s your Mob?”, contemplating whether a computer-based system could be trained to ‘remember’ the Country it comes from, and whether it should. In doing this, Sherwood Spring speculates that materials hold memory – that computer chips and semiconductor processors remember the Country that their materials, such as sand for silicon, are extracted from.

DIGGERMODE muses on the problems that arise from new technologies providing instantaneous and open access to cultural belongings and documentation of our people. The work highlights the environmental impact of our digital world; it is Indigenous peoples who most intimately feel the growing impacts of capitalism and climate change on their lands and ways of being.

“Tracing the material and cultural implications of extraction and storage, DIGGERMODE is a generative behind-the-servers look into how memory works within platform capitalism.”

DIGGERMODE questions the social and environmental ethics of technology in constructing, storing and sharing our images, whether in surveillance databases, museum archives or online. With artificial intelligence (AI), Joel Sherwood Spring has created landscapes in the style of acclaimed Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira being torn apart by mining machinery, and has trained another AI to answer questions like “Who’s your Mob?” Presumably, anyone could do this – but should anyone be able to appropriate Indigenous art from the internet? How do we protect our knowledges in digital spaces? Can sand used to make silicon microchips contain memories of Country?

Joel’s work confronts the viewer with uncomfortable and overlooked aspects of our hyper-networked age, grounding the possibilities of ‘the cloud’ and AI in the broader context of ongoing colonisation. The work considers the environmental damage caused by new technology and data storage, and how it is Indigenous peoples whose lands and ways of being are profoundly impacted by capitalism’s extractive processes.

How I See It: Blak Art and Film 10am–5pm daily  16 Dec 2022–19 Feb 2023  FREE ACMI FED SQUARE

Acknowledgements