Disruptive Methods
Description
Disruptive Methods brings together UTS researchers and collaborators from Brighton, Canberra, Edinburgh, New York, and São Paulo for two days of critical inquiry — interrogating and reimagining the tools, systems and methods through which we understand and shape the world.
A program of roundtables, workshops, and performances explore topics including decolonial mapping, augmented reality for social justice, visualising cultural metadata and AI ethics. The program features a Data Salon, co-hosted by the Sydney Culture Network in the UTS Data Arena, and an exhibition of HDR 'Objects of Research'. A storytelling event at Knox Street Bar showcases non-traditional approaches to communicating research, in a social setting. The workshop stream provides hands-on experience of disruptive methods, including a dice-based game for exploring ethical AI and an erasure and redaction workshop.
THURSDAY 25 JUNE
Refreshments and viewing of work from 9.30am.
Architecture Lobby, L5, UTS Building 6, 702 Harris Street.
10–11.30am: VISUALISING PRESENCE AND ABSENCE
Countermaps produced through UTS Architecture and Landscape Architecture studio teaching.
A roundtable conversation, accompanied by a showcase of counter-mapping work, including large format prints and documentary films:
'Counter-Mapping: A Field Survey'. Dr Endriana Audisho, Matte Ager-McConnell and Tom Woodhead (UTS Architecture).
'Anarchival Art and Colonial Visibility in Brazil and Australia'. Dr Victor Murari, (the Decolonial Atlas, Brazil).
'Black Diasporas Warrane-Sydney project'. Kholi Dhliwayo (afroOURban Art).
11.45am–1pm: DISRUPTING BODIES IN SPACE
Left: John Morrison. Right: Andrew Burrell
Short presentations from Dr Andrew Burrell and Dr John Morrison followed by a critical dialogue.
'Xenotone: Speculative ecologies between the physical and the virtual'. Dr Andrew Burrell (UTS Design).
'Bodies, Borders, and Belonging: An Augmented Reality music video co-developed with young men affected by violence.' Dr John Morrison. (Edinburgh Napier University)
1–2pm: Lunch and Exhibition viewing:
Opportunity to discuss Objects of Research exhibition with PhD and MA candidates exhibiting work from their research practices.
2 – 3.30pm: REIMAGINING THE ORDER OF THINGS
Left: Linda Matthews. Right: Mitchell Whitelaw and Adrian Mackenzie.
Project presentations and discussion ranging from reimagining systems cities and the bodies that move them them, to the taxonomic organisation of the Atlas of Living Australia:
'The End of the Line.' A/Prof. Linda Matthews (UTS Architecture)
'ALA Lens and BioCLIP: reordering species in place and space'. Prof. Mitchell Whitelaw (ANU School of Art and Design).
'Feminist Killjoy Flaneuserie'. Dr Sally Sutherland (University of Brighton).
DATA SALON: DISRUPTING CULTURAL METADATA
4 – 5.30pm: Project Share and workshop
UTS Data Arena, L2, UTS Building 11, 81-117 Broadway.
Left: Thomas Ricciardiello. Right: Sarah Jane Jones.
Data Salon is a Sydney Culture Network program for GLAM professionals interested in the creative and critical uses of cultural data. This session showcases researchers engaging with fragmented archival material: from typographic trails revealing long-absent trees, to hands-on activities that invite participants to write descriptions for objects that have little to say for themselves. We'll work with the Australian Museum's Harry Burrell Glass Plate Negative collection – images with scarce accompanying metadata – as provocations for thinking about absence, interpretation, and the creative possibilities that emerge when the catalogue runs dry.
Presentations in the UTS Data Arena, a 360º panoramic, 3D stereoscopic, multi-user interactive theatre, include Thomas Ricciardiello's 'Weapons of Slow Destruction', Mitchell Whitelaw and Adrian Mackenzie's ALA Lens, Sarah Jane Jones' 'Type Trails' and new work from Justin Harvey. A participatory speculative metadata workshop will be led by Monica Monin and Zoë Sadokierski.
6–8pm: DISRUPTIVE STORYTELLING SALON AT KNOX STREET BAR
11 Knox Street (Corner, Shepherd St, Chippendale
The Disruptive Storytelling Salon is an event featuring short performance lectures and visual narratives — five to ten minutes each — where presenters share stories drawn from the research practices. Past tales have followed a goose down the Cook's River, unpacked the inner life of mould in a Sydney terrace, and somehow managed to make audiences laugh and cry in the same breath. Speakers include Andrew Burrell, Dave Drayton, Delia Falconer, Corey Lange and Zoë Sadokierski.
FRIDAY 26 JUNE
Refreshments and viewing of work from 9.30am.
Design Lobby, L6, UTS Building 6, 702 Harris Street.
Erasure / Redaction Workshop: 10–11.30
Dave Drayton (UTS Writing) leads a hands-on workshop exploring erasure / redaction techniques to obscure or remove text from documents as a narrative technique.
AI Ethical Encounters: A Heuristic Approach to Critical Design Reflection
Workshop: 11.30 – 1pm
John Morrison (Edinburgh Napier University) leads a dice-based framework for thinking critically about AI. Ten ethical dimensions structure the conversation: consent, labour, ecology, authorship, bias, transparency, authority, futures, relationships, and inclusive learning. Two blank faces invite participants to name what matters most to them. The mechanic is direct. Roll two dice. Two dimensions land. Their intersection generates a question that neither produces alone. Roll again for deeper probing questions. Respond from your own position. Others introduce complications. The conversation builds. Participants leave with direct experience of the heuristic and a critical vocabulary for integrating ethical reflection into their own practice. It works in multiple contexts: a designer questioning their own workflow, a teaching team shaping AI policy, or an organisation developing ethical governance. https://liminalstudios.xyz/portfolio/aidice
2–4pm Objects of Research talks.
HDR candidates from across the university share the stories behind the objects on display in the L6 foyer space.
Speaker bios
Matte Ager-McConnell
Matte Ager-McConnell is a Wiradjuri Dabee man belonging to the Cudgegong River holding profound responsibilities to water and Country. He is a lecturer in the UTS School of Architecture, where his teaching, research, and practice is led by ngurambang, Country.
Endriana Audisho
Dr Endriana Audisho is a lecturer and Public Programs Director at the School of Architecture, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Her research and teaching practice are deeply rooted in postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, aiming to uncover spatial and social injustices while proposing alternative architectural and urban narratives, fictions, and imaginaries. She explores decolonial approaches to architectural education, experimenting with pedagogies and practices that realign the field with its socio-political dimension.
Andrew Burrell
Andrew Burrell (Associate head of School, Design (Teaching and learning) at the University of Technology Sydney) is a practice-based researcher and educator exploring virtual and digitally mediated environments as a site for the construction, experience and exploration of memory as narrative. Their ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual and augmented environments. Andrew's networked projects in virtual and augmented environments have received international recognition.
Kholisile Dhliwayo
Kholisile Dhliwayo is an African+Australian architect, artist, and curator who specializes in culturally responsive, context-driven design. His works include Brooklyn Bronzes, a permanent installation at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts honoring Black Brooklynites, and Black Diasporas, a geolocated oral narrative archive and exhibition about Black life in Tkaronto-Toronto, Naarm-Melbourne, Boorloo-Perth, and Warrane-Sydney. He has also contributed to various civic projects, including the Canadian Senate, Javits Center, and David Geffen Hall. A Harvard Kennedy School Social Innovation Change Initiative fellow and Harvard GSD graduate, his interdisciplinary approach is relational and collaborative, engaging art, technology, and culture as tools to make architecture, interiors, and installations that are reflective of place, people, and culture.
Dave Drayton
Dr Dave Drayton is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. His work includes P(oe)Ms, published by Rabbit Poetry; British P(oe)Ms, published by Beir Bua (Ireland); and the novella E, UIO, A, published by Container (US). In 2015, Dave received his PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, where he has taught into writing and communications subjects. He has appeared at the the Newcastle Writers' Festival, National Young Writers' Festival, Perth Poetry Festival, and has given papers at the Australian Association of Writing Programs and International Association for Literary Journalism Studies. His writing has appeared in Meanjin, The Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, Australian Poetry Journal, and other publications.
Delia Falconer
Dr Delia Falconer is the author of two novels (The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers) and two works of nonfiction (Sydney and Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss), which have been shortlisted for national and international awards across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, innovation, biography, history and research. She is the editor of three cohort-defining collections: The Best Australian Stories 2008, The Best Australian Stories 2009 and The Penguin Book of the Road. Delia's short stories and essays have been widely anthologised, including in the landmark Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Century of Australian Stories. She has received grants and residencies from the Australia Council, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, Varuna and Bundanon, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland.
Justin Harvey
Justin Harvey is an artist and academic living and working on Gadigal land with a diverse background in visual arts & production. As well as writing/directing his own short films, Justin has worked in research and camera departments for TV, as DOP on music videos, producer/director on advertising campaigns and picture editor on feature documentary and drama projects. Justin's creative practice research spans photography, moving image, installation and virtual reality experience in solo and collaborative practice. He nurtures an ongoing fascination with the creative potentials of human machine interaction, embracing experimental methods that seek to exploit digital imaging technologies, and the evolving ‘artificial intelligence’ systems that increasingly drive them, in unintended and playful ways. His solo works have explored the ‘glitch’ as aesthetic and political movement, still and moving image collage, the novel shaping of digital video feedback and imagery generated using a variety of diffusion models. His research in creative uses of GenAI informs his teaching in experimental media arts.
Corey Lange
Hey there, I’m Corey! A designer creating on Gadigal Land. As a designer, I have worked across a huge range of mediums; dabbled in publication design, worked on branding but my focus lies in print and zine making. Experimenting with print media forms is a true passion of mine. I have had work exhibited from community art shows to the State Library and sold at numerous fairs and markets. Alongside my art and design practice I am passionate about running workshops in zine making, an interest I am currently exploring through a PhD program at UTS.
Linda Matthews
Dr Linda Matthews is Co-Director of the UTS Visualisation Institute and Associate Head of the School of Architecture (Research) at the University of Technology Sydney. She leads research at the intersection of architectural design, visualisation, and sensing technologies, with a focus on defence-relevant applications. Her work develops novel methods for analysing and disrupting camera-based systems, including autonomous and UAS sensing platforms. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, she translates design-led research into operational capabilities that support situational awareness, counter-surveillance, and resilience in urban and tactical environments.
Monica Monin
Dr Monica Monin is a practice-based design researcher and Course Director of the Visual Communication degree. Her research explores design and creative practice within an overabundant and heterogenous media ecology. Specifically her research addresses the effects, possibilities and role of computation, code and data within poetics (making). Her creative practice critically and actively works with coding in order to investigate, and create encounters with, the intensive media ecologies involved in the production of knowledge and meaning-making. This investigatory approach to creative practice has guided written publications and conference presentations on critical visualisation, generative machine learning, human-machine relations, and AI imaginaries.
John Morrison
John's practice-based PhD employed Research through Design (RtD) as a mode of trauma-informed inquiry. He is interested in generative design research techniques focusing on co-constructing insights that explore the participatory and agential potential of lens-based technologies. His research led to a role in the Love group for the Scottish Independent Care Review. His collaborative performances at the UK Department of Education and the Scottish Parliament were designed to provoke policy changes in the design and delivery of care service provision. https://liminalstudios.xyz/
Victor Murari
My research investigates digital art as a field shaped by historical, technical, and epistemological disputes. Drawing on art history and cultural criticism, I examine how platforms, databases, archives, and interfaces structure regimes of visibility that reiterate asymmetries inherent to digital colonialism. I am interested in artistic practices that operate in friction with these systems, proposing critical cartographies, partial narratives, and alternative forms of memory in cyberspace, while understanding curatorship as an act of montage, translation, and critical positioning.
Zoë Sadokierski
Dr Zoë Sadokierski is a designer, writer, creative producer and associate professor in Visual Communication at the UTS School of Design. Her practice-based research explores ways that visual communication – particularly illustrated nonfiction, data storytelling and anarchival collage – can be used to engage audiences with complex scientific and cultural issues. She is a former president and founding member of the Australian Book Designers Association. In 2015 Zoë established Page Screen Books, an independent publisher of artist’s books and visual essays. Her works on paper and artist books have been exhibited and collected internationally. Her book Father, Son and Other Animals (2024) explores explores climate change and species extinctions through the lenses of parenting and creative practice.
Sally Sutherland
My research interests include the ways design shapes and is shaped by systems of care, health, and inequality. My AHRC-funded PhD explored how design practices in the UK contribute to health inequities, with a particular focus on breastfeeding and caregiving as sites of cultural stigma, systemic exclusion, and potential transformation. The project paid particular attention to class-based disparities and the marginalisation of maternal voices within both health and design contexts. I drew on feminist, decolonial, and practice-based approaches to challenge dominant biomedical and individualised narratives, instead foregrounding relational, situated, and systemic perspectives. I’m particularly interested in design justice, ontological design, and the role of reflexivity in research and practice. I am currently working as a Research Fellow in Urban Mobilities on the ESRC‑funded international project Experimental Storying for Intergenerational and Intersectional Equity in the 15‑Minute City.
Mitchell Whitelaw
Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and maker with interests in digital design and culture, data practices, more-than-human worlds and digital collections. His teaching and research takes up data and code to seek out moments of insight and delight that intensify our engagement with a complex world. His work has appeared in journals including Leonardo, Digital Creativity, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Senses and Society. He has worked with institutions including the State Library of NSW, the State Library of Queensland, the National Archives and the National Gallery of Australia, developing "generous" interfaces to their digital collections. His current research investigates environmental and biodiversity visualisation, and digital design for a more-than-human world. Mitchell is Professor of Design in the School of Art and Design at the Australian National University.
Thomas Woodhead
Thomas Woodhead is a Landscape Architect and Lecturer in the UTS School of Architecture. His work and teaching practice focus on the intersection between ecological and human communities, and visualising these narratives through a cartographic lens.
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