T5 WEEK 2: NEW TECHNOLOGIES & CONTEMPORARY ART
- Feb 21
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 28
This week shifts from experimentation to contextualisation. The focus is on examining how contemporary artists integrate digital and interactive technologies into conceptual frameworks, and how process documentation supports critical development.
Australian Centre of Moving Image:
ACMI positions itself as Australia’s national museum of screen culture, dedicated to film, television, videogames, digital art, and interactive media. Located at Federation Square in Melbourne, it operates at the intersection of exhibition, education, archive, and technological experimentation. Its curatorial framework treats the moving image not simply as entertainment, but as a structural force shaping contemporary perception and cultural production.
One of ACMI’s key strengths is its commitment to interactivity. Exhibitions often incorporate immersive installations, playable interfaces, and participatory environments that foreground audience engagement. This approach aligns with contemporary understandings of media as relational and networked rather than fixed. By presenting videogames alongside experimental film and digital art, ACMI destabilises traditional hierarchies between high art and popular culture. It acknowledges that screen-based experience now underpins everyday life.
Read: The story of the moving image: Digital and interactive art, n.d., ACMI, viewed 19 February 2026, <https://www.acmi.net.au/story-of-the-moving-image/digital-interactive-art/>.
Jacolby Satterwhite
Jacolby Satterwhite (born 1986, Columbia, South Carolina, and currently lives and works in New York City) received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 (Art21). Satterwhite does not present identity as stable or singular. Through 3D animation, avatars, and immersive digital architecture, he reconstructs the self as spatial, multiplied, and coded. Identity becomes something built within technological systems rather than expressed through traditional portraiture.
Cao Fei
Cao Fei (born 1978, Guangzhou, China) is a contemporary multimedia artist whose practice examines identity, urbanisation, and the impact of digital systems on contemporary life. Working across film, virtual reality, digital simulation, installation, and online platforms, she critically investigates subjectivity within accelerated technological modernity. Through speculative environments where fantasy, labour, consumer culture, and digital identity converge, she positions technology not as neutral infrastructure but as a social and psychological condition. In projects such as RMB City, developed within Second Life, and My City is Yours, she interrogates how urbanisation, global capitalism, and networked media reshape identity, blurring distinctions between real and simulated space. Her work situates the self within infrastructural frameworks, revealing how contemporary subjectivity is reorganised by urban, digital, and economic forces rather than expressed as autonomous or stable.
Digital Revolution at the Barbican
Digital Revolution exhibition at the Barbican Centre surveyed the evolution of digital technology in contemporary art, design, music, and interactive culture, presenting code as a creative medium rather than a technical tool. The exhibition emphasised participation and immersive environments, highlighting the shift from passive viewing to responsive engagement. The exhibition reinforces the importance of using technology as a structural framework rather than visual spectacle within contemporary practice.
Learning to Love You More is a participatory art project initiated in 2002 by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Structured as an open, instruction-based platform, the project invited participants to complete creative “assignments” and submit documentation of their responses online. These tasks ranged from simple performative gestures to acts of reflection and interpersonal exchange. The project operated digitally, using the internet as both exhibition space and distribution mechanism, thereby decentralising authorship and expanding the definition of artistic production.
Rather than privileging individual artistic talent, Learning to Love You More foregrounded collective contribution and process. The website functioned as an evolving archive of submissions, collapsing distinctions between artist and audience. The work aligns with relational and socially engaged art practices, emphasising participation, vulnerability, and shared authorship over formal resolution.
While the project does not directly inform my current body of work, it does provide a useful precedent for future community-based initiatives. The instruction-driven model offers a framework for participatory engagement that could be adapted to collaborative or public-facing projects beyond my current investigation.
Jess Johnson works across drawing, animation, and immersive digital installation to construct these mandala-like environments structured through repetition, geometric patterning, and proliferating symbolic forms. Beginning with highly detailed black-and-white ink drawings, she develops dense visual systems that disrupt conventional perspective and unsettle stable spatial order. These drawings often expand into animated and full-dome projections, such as XYZZY (with Simon Ward), where digital technology animates her mark-making rather than replacing it. Her work situates identity and consciousness within layered, networked systems, demonstrating how analogue and digital processes can merge to produce immersive, psychologically charged spaces rather than discrete images.
The photographic collages, or "joiners," of David Hockney represent a sustained investigation into perception, temporality, and the limits of single-point perspective. Constructed from multiple photographic prints assembled into composite images, these works reject the illusion of a unified optical viewpoint. Instead, they propose vision as cumulative, mobile, and durational. The camera, traditionally associated with mechanical objectivity, is reconfigured as a tool for constructing subjective spatial experience.
By breaking apart and reconstructing the image, he exposes photography’s claim to singular truth as constructed. Multiplicity replaces unity. The viewer’s eye moves across the surface, reconstructing spatial relationships in a way that mirrors embodied perception. Their grid-like structures and modular assembly resonate with algorithmic tiling and tessellation.
References:
ACMI 2021, Welcome to ACMI: your museum of screen culture, online video, YouTube, viewed 21 February 2026, <https://youtu.be/CGjnZhi0klU>.
Art21 2024, Cao Fei in “Fantasy” – Season 5 – Art in the Twenty-First Century, online video, YouTube, viewed 16 February 2026, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHlRliJf4t4>.
Artsy n.d., David Hockney Collages, Artsy, viewed 27 February 2026, <https://www.artsy.net/artist-series/david-hockney-collages>.
Barbican Centre 2014, Welcome to Digital Revolution, online video, YouTube, viewed 16 February 2026, <https://youtu.be/s6cn8xFfDIQ>.
Barbican Centre n.d., Digital Revolution, Barbican Centre, viewed 16 February 2026, <https://www.barbican.org.uk/hire/exhibition-hire-bie/past-bie-exhibitions/digital-revolution>.
Cao Fei n.d., Cao Fei, viewed 21 February 2026, <https://www.caofei.com/>. (Photos 5, 6 & 7)
Jacolby Satterwhite, Art21, viewed 21 February 2026, <https://art21.org/artist/jacolby-satterwhite>. (Photo 2, 3 & 4)
Johnson, J n.d., Jess Johnson, viewed 21 February 2026, <https://www.jessjohnson.org/>.
Johnson, J & Ward, S 2024, XYZZY FullDome Film Trailer, online video, Vimeo, viewed 16 February 2026, <https://vimeo.com/874604774>.
July, M & Fletcher, H n.d., Journal, Learning to Love You More, viewed 16 February 2026, <http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/displays/journal.php>. (Photo 8)
MET 2023, Meet the Artist—The Great Hall Commission: Jacolby Satterwhite, A Metta Prayer, online video, 20/10/23, viewed 18 January 2025, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OEsz3ByhMc>. (Photo 1)
The story of the moving image: Digital and interactive art, n.d., ACMI, viewed 19 February 2026, <https://www.acmi.net.au/story-of-the-moving-image/digital-interactive-art/>.
