Panel Discussion: The Queer Lens

Join Pierre Proske from Melbourne Media Lab in conversation with the artists Wesley Dowling, Liam Power, Xanthe Dobbie and Drew Pettifer in the Bunjil Place Studio as they discuss their digital art practices and how queerness informs the ideas behind their work. 

Realness is an interactive, participatory digital artwork presented on the Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen as part of the MidSumma Festival. The work samples pixels and recorded audio from the audiences’ webcams, accumulating, fragmenting and overlaying the captured data to create an ever-changing generative audio-visual experience.  

Find out more about Realness here 

Wesley Dowling (he/him) is a Melbourne-based emerging queer artist whose work encompasses lens based and interactive digital media. He creates web-browser based works that examine and queers the normative structures that are embedded in digital imaging and computing. Dowling’s work has exhibited in galleries and public spaces such as The Wrong Biennale (2019), No Vacancy (Melbourne 2019), Site Eight Gallery (2019) and West Projections Festival (2018). He was a finalist in the 2020 Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award.  He was also an artist in residence in the Centre for Projection Art Residency Summer 2020 Program and is currently working towards presenting new work for Gertrude Street Projection Festival. 

Liam Power (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist and creative-coder based in Melbourne, Australia. I work a lot with video, sound and data. Power’s work primarily questions and critiques the boundaries of systems and their function in society. These systems could be computing technologies, perceptual and cognitive relations, or corporate surveillance techniques. He is currently experimenting with the use of neural networks, intersections between data and perception, creative web application programming, coding algorithms to deidentify and abstract humans, the cinematic tropes of digital culture and manipulating YouTube algorithms. 

Xanthe Dobbie (they/them) is an Australian new media artist and filmmaker. Working across on - and offline modes of making, Dobbie’s practice aims to capture the experience of contemporaneity as reflected through queer and feminist ideologies. Drawing on humour, pop, sex, history and iconography, they develop shrines to a post-truth era. Their work has featured multiple times in the Melbourne Fringe Festival, the MidSumma Festival, the Channels Festival as well as the GLOW Festival (2017), Queeriot (2017), the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Queertech (2017) and the Gertrude Street Projection Festival (2013). They have also exhibited and performed extensively across Melbourne and Sydney.

Drew Pettifer (he/him) is an artist and academic and currently Program Lead of the Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) Hong Kong Program offering at RMIT University. Drew’s art practice explores themes of intimacy, gender, sexuality, power, the archive and social politics using photography, video, installation and performance. Drew is currently a member of the Shepparton Art Museum Artistic Advisory Panel. He is also a qualified solicitor and works from time to time as an independent curator and writer. His work is held in various collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Monash Gallery of Art, as well as private collections nationally and internationally. 

Pierre Proske (he/him) is an electronic media artist and designer specialising in immersive and interactive installations. Having worked extensively in Europe on various commissions and artistic projects in conjunction with organisations such as the Ars Electronica, Futurelab, and Future Applications Lab, his work involves exposing the unspoken relationships we have with technology as well as harnessing machines into exploring new aesthetics. He has a particular interest in the interface between the biological and synthetic, as well as the ways in which humans engage and form relationships with machines. Pierre has been creating custom artistic software for over a decade, which he routinely deploys in his installations. He is the founder of electronic media arts organisation Media Lab Melbourne and runs his own creative technology studio Sensory Empire. 

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