Centre for Projection Art
2025 Residency Exhibition
2 – 30 September, 5.00pm – 7.00pm daily (no screening when there are other events in the Plaza)
Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen
Header image: Rebecca Najdowski, Another Nature (still), 2025.
This September, Bunjil Place is proud to exhibit new digital artworks from artists participating in the Centre for Projection Art’s residency program.
These innovative works have already been showcased at Fed Square as part of the Now or Never festival, and will also feature as site-specific installations at Collingwood Town Hall.
Intra-Connection —
Curatorial Statement by Arie Glorie
My curatorial approach is grounded in lived and embodied encounters with forest ecosystems, from early experiences in the Daintree on Kuku Yalanji Country to field research in the Amazon and other biodiverse environments. These places have been more than sites of observation; they have been collaborators, shaping my understanding of the complex, reciprocal processes that bind species, landscapes, and technologies. In these ecosystems, nothing exists in isolation. As theorists such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad suggest, all beings and materials are constituted through relations, constantly in the process of influencing, adapting, and transforming one another.
The eight artists in the 2025 Centre for Projection Art Residency program respond to this entangled condition through diverse and experimental practices. Their works engage with themes of multispecies entanglement, ecological memory, posthuman presence, and technological symbiosis, blurring the distinctions between organism and environment, nature and machine. In doing so, they align with Barad’s notion of “intra-action,” where meaning and matter emerge through mutual co-constitution, rather than from discrete, pre-existing entities.
Together, their works form an open-ended dialogue, one that resists hierarchy and instead embraces mutual responsiveness, feedback loops, and shared agency.
Ariel Ruby, Madonna dell’Arco (still), 2025
Madonna dell'Arco
This work explores my ancestral connection to Marianism and the mysteries of the Black Madonnas of Southern Italy, focusing on the Madonna dell’Arco - her healing powers, and votive rituals associated with her devotion. Legend says that on the Monday after Easter in 1450, two boys played near a niche where a painting of the Madonna stood. After losing, one boy became enraged, cursed the image, and threw a ball at her face. Blood flowed from her left cheek, and when he tried to run, his feet refused to move. The crowd cried out: Miracolo!
Ariel Ruby is an Australian-Italian artist exploring deep connections to places she has called home and those she can imagine. Her work creates vibrant, immersive worlds filled with glittering objects, rich narratives, and emotional memory. Drawing inspiration from folklore, storytelling, and ritual, she merges traditional techniques with contemporary themes. Working across sculptural and digital mediums, she favours practical effects over digital manipulation, using cloud tanks, dioramas, stop motion, and time-lapse to craft evocative visual experiences.
@arielruby
arielruby.com
Ben Joseph Andrews & Emma Roberts, Movements I-III (still), 2025.
MovementsI-III
Drawing on the visual language of 19th-century chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey, Movements I-III reclaims and recontextualises the movement study, not as scientific dissection, but as intimate self-portraiture. Ben, who lives with a vestibular disability, reperforms Marey’s human locomotion studies, recorded in mo-cap (a technology itself descended from Marey’s work). But the traces left behind fracture and blur, warped by the real-time kinetic and atmospheric conditions of our environment at time of recording. We want to express the body as a collective, porous entity, shaped by the ever-moving world around it, and to explore a language for movement complexity within a framework of radical vestibular accessibility.
Ben Joseph Andrews & Emma Roberts are a new media artist duo based on Wathaurong Country, regional Victoria. Their immersive, audience-led installations integrate emerging technology to expand perceptions, reawaken curiosity, and interrogate the liminal space between the physical and the digital. Their work has been presented at Sundance, Adelaide Festival, ACMI, MIT, Science Gallery Michigan, Venice Film Festival, and the Experimenta Triennial (2025–27), positioning them at the forefront of experimental digital art in Australia and beyond.
@benjosephandrews
benjosephandrews.com
pernicketysplit.com
J. Rosenbaum, Slopocene Icons (still), 2025.
Slopocene Icons
Slopocene Icons interrogates AI slop on social media and juxtaposes it with classical sculpture to draw a connection between AI as an emerging fascist aesthetic. The algorithmic gaze of generative AI echoes the fascinations of 20th century dictators with classical statuary as an idealised form of humanity. By bringing together AI slop and classical imagery, Slopocene Icons stages a cautionary narrative. It asks us to examine how generative AI, marketed as neutral and creative, encodes, amplifies, and aestheticises authoritarian ideals, enforcing narrow visions of beauty, gender, and humanity under the guise of progress.
J. Rosenbaum is a Melbourne-based artist and researcher working across 3D modelling, AI, and extended reality. Their practice merges classical aesthetics with new media to explore posthuman and postgender concepts. With a PhD from RMIT University, J examines AI’s perceptions of gender and bias, particularly towards gender minorities. Their work has been exhibited globally, presented at international conferences, and granted the Midsumma Australia Post Art Prize. J's practice envisions a future that acknowledges and includes gender diversity.
@minxdragon
jrosenbaum.com.au
Max Brading, Dog Brained, Dog Rot (still), 2025.
Dog Brained, Dog Rot
Dog Brained is made using phone photographs of myself and Freddie from my cloud storage, trained into machine learning and AI models. Freddie is a 9-year-old Staffy-mix born in Wiradjuri country on a farm in the NSW Riverina. I use sounds from Tik Tok, recordings of my walks with Freddie, AI-generated videos and video from my DSLR. Tik Tok trains its algorithm on my content. I am frequently shown dog memes in my algorithm. As part of Freddie's training, I give him treats for being calm, he is reactive around most dogs but likes all humans.
Max Brading is a multidisciplinary artist investigating the intersections of technology, environment, and cyborg experience. Their practice unravels the entangled systems shaping contemporary life, remixing and reconfiguring their elements into new forms. Grounded in experimental technology, Max blends technical knowledge with performance and collaborative exploration, examining the relationships we form through techno mediation. Their work invites audiences to reconsider their interactions with the technological systems that surround them.
@i.hate_max
badmax.tv
Melania Jack, Flock Mend (still), 2025.
FlockMend
This movement and digital collage work imagines a speculative present where human and more-than-human life coexist in interconnected reciprocity. Influenced by biomimicry, anticolonial thought, and ecological embodiment, the work expresses a deep yearning for re-integration with the natural world. Through flocking, ripples, and sensory attunement, humans merge with their environment, connected and transformed. Movement becomes a tool for listening, re-learning, and repair. This is a vision of nourishment, of presence, of flocking and mending, not to escape collapse, but to emerge through it with grace.
Melania Jack is an interdisciplinary artist based in Gimuy (Cairns), exploring posthuman feminism, environmental ethics, and non-human rights.
@theironingmaidens
ironingmaidens.com.au
Rebecca Najdowski, Another Nature (still), 2025.
Another Nature
Another Nature explores global bushfire/wildfire and its effects through more-than-human sensing. This work imagines how plants, animals, insects, and machines might perceive environmental change. I wanted to move beyond conventional climate crisis representations by using technologies that envision a world typically invisible to human perception like infrared, microscopy, and satellite imagery. I adopt these scientific imaging techniques to reveal a strange and vivid dimension of the climate crisis, inviting possibilities for deeper environmental understanding through non-human perceptions.
Rebecca Najdowski is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose work explores how nature and the climate crisis are mediated through photographic technologies. In her practice, she uses the materiality of analogue and digital processes to alter habitual ways of seeing and relating to more-than-human nature. Her experimental techniques include direct exposure of photographic materials to natural phenomena, finding creative potential in glitched 3D scans of flora, and regenerating environmental datasets into AI imagery, exposing hidden interconnections between natural and digital systems.
@rebecca.najdowski
rebeccanajdowski.com
Shirin Shakhesi, Echoes Between (still), 2025.
Echoes Between
Echoes Between explores the shifting rhythms between urban structures and natural landscapes, tracing the subtle psychological transitions we undergo when moving between these environments. Through projection, layered imagery, and sound, the work creates a space where concrete and soil, chaos and stillness, converge and intermingle. It reflects on how these opposing worlds are not only in tension but also in dialogue, shaping our sense of belonging and perception. The piece invites viewers to pause, listen, and inhabit the fragile balance between city and earth.
Shirin Shakhesi is an Iranian-Australian multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of animation and moving image. Her practice explores the dynamic interplay between environment, identity, and emotional states, drawing on personal transitions and cultural narratives. Through movement and transformation, she creates poetic visual landscapes that blur the line between reality and perception. Her work reflects on change and impermanence, offering immersive experiences that invite audiences into fluid, shifting worlds.
@shirinshakhesi
shirinshakhesi.com
