DATA MINDS examines emerging processes and issues arising from technology, exploring how art can grapple with the rapidly developing field of Artificial Intelligence, and the pervasive influence of the Internet on modern society. With each artist incorporating or critiquing synthetic, AI or net-based media at the centre of their practice, this exhibition offers a timely exploration of rapidly evolving fields.

Each invited artists’ practices offer alternative views of these systems, often rooted in physical media, and assisted by or examining AI and net-based technologies or ideas. In DATA MINDS, artists and audiences are encouraged to ponder these issues through critical and creative engagement. Each artist may be seen as grouped together through a form of ‘pattern recognition’, each linked by a common thread. These threads may be as literal as shared media - moving image, installation - and as esoteric as popular culture, conspiracy theories, and ghosts.

This summer, in The Lock-Up’s historical, maze-like spaces, these speculative futures become rooted in a material setting. Physical works become embedded with fictions, uniting the subconscious and the digital; the imagined and the real. The only thing certain in DATA MINDS is, whatever AI and the Internet really ‘are’, they exist in an undeniably human world: fallible, illogical, and driven by subconscious desires.

Roy Ananda, Girl On Road, HIBALL, Jon Rafman and Brie Trenerry. Curated by Wednesday Sutherland, assisted by Alexandra Kirwood

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; and The Lock-Up’s Artist in Residence program.

Image: HIBALL, Composition for Mnemosyne (still), 2024. Two-channel 4K video with sound.