Critical-Creative AI: Glitched Assistants and Gems in the Slop

The College of Design and Social Context is delighted to present Critical-Creative AI: Glitched Assistants and Gems in the Slop for candidates and supervisors of the Urban Futures and Social Change Symposia.

What happens when generative AI tools misfire, misunderstand, or hallucinate? This hands-on workshop explores critical-creative approaches to working with (and against) GenAI systems. Drawing from media research, design methods, and glitch aesthetics, we’ll treat AI not just as a tool, but as a messy collaborator. Through demos, prompt experiments, and interpretive exercises, participants will learn to extract insight from error, build weird workflows, and document their own slop-inflected research processes. Come curious — leave with new techniques, frameworks, and a glitched assistant of your own.

Facilitator

Dr Daniel Binns is a Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT University, Melbourne, and a tinkerer-theorist whose research and creative practice explore synthetic media, critical AI literacies, and glitch-based methods of creative engagement. He is the author of The Hollywood War Film (2017), Material Media-Making in the Digital Age (2021), and co-editor of Confronting the Climate Crisis: Activism, Technology and Ecoaesthetics (2025); his films and experimental works—including the award-winning AI short The Technician—have screened internationally. His current projects examine informal AI practices and ecosystems, media methods for analysing AI-generated content, and critical-creative frameworks for understanding overproduced synthetic media. He is an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and shares his work at www.liminalloop.xyz

This session will be catered. 

Accessibility
This session will not be recorded or live-streamed due to format.
The venue is accessible via lift from street level.
For additional accessibility requirements please contact host.

Image generated by Leonardo.Ai, 6 May 2025; prompt by Daniel Binns.