Dave Court, Everything Is Computer, 2025, Computer equipment, projectors, trestle tables, cables. Image courtesy the artist. Photo: Morgan Sette.
Dave: I’ve been playing with AI image generators as they become accessible — as one of many tools — to understand how they feel and function. My recent body of work, Everything Is Computer (2025), collates these images, textures and ideas into an amorphous installation, reflecting on the systems that create them.
GenAI is a teleological outcome of capital and the internet, digitising and quantifying the entire world into spreadsheets and pixels. [1] All that data collection had to be for something.
Physically, our current AI moment embodies the materiality of the internet violently blooming in the form of data centres, carbon emissions, inflated markets and AI decision-making tools used to select bombing targets. As these changes disrupt physical spaces, the way we interact with digital systems — and the way they interact with us — will continue to rapidly change. This might feel like an opportunity for positive change or upheaval, but as long as these tools are created and implemented by existing power structures, their dominance will be perpetuated.
In my practice, I think about how physical and digital states oscillate and overlap. I embrace and expose the materiality of digital images; projection wrapping around architecture, pushing the limitations of a computer’s processing power, and not concealing cables with a neat strip of tape on a white gallery wall.
All digital media is produced, filtered, distorted and affected by the physical circumstances of their production and delivery. Jankspace / Junkspace. [2] [3]
Dave Court, Transparent Gesture, 2025, Acrylic and aerosol on canvas with aluminium mounting hardware. 100x160cm. Image courtesy the artist.
What is it that can make a painting a reliable, stable viewing experience and watching a scratched DVD or 240p Youtube video on a dodgy internet connection unsettling and unpredictable? This reliability is affected by visible or invisible physical interruptions: the DVD disc or the wifi waves your phone is surfing. I’m drawn to these physical impacts on digital surfaces, whether unintentional glitch or deliberate intervention.
Some of my paintings reverse this logic; a glassy digital object distorts the view of a painting underneath.
In the realm of digital image consumption, the reliability or truth of any image has shifted with the capacity for verisimilitude that GenAI has already achieved.
The possibility that any image you come across on a screen could be GenAI affects your relationship to every image on a screen. For art, this puts a renewed onus on context and process: if a viewer can understand how an image is made, or know it has been vetted by a trusted source, a solid image consumption experience can
be restored.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter to the average viewer whether an image is GenAI or free-range organic. It’s just more content in the media environment that
washes over us.
Jen: The connection to digital media’s materiality is indirect. I experience it in systems: the patterned infrastructures that shape attention, perception and behaviour. The endless wash of images and the infinite scroll is something we all inhabit. Perception is enmeshed with infrastructure, and we live in a system of vibes circulating affect and attention to varying degrees, sometimes joyously, sometimes to a point of misguidance. [4]
Like Dave, I’ve been 3D modelling artworks, mostly to plan and visualise, including work for the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Yield Strength, which demanded a sustained period of physical making. Fabricating large steel sculptures shifts attention back to material resistance and durational processes. Working this way produces a mode of attention that is immersive and ambient, yet materially grounded.
Digital platforms produce a comparable ambience, but via a different logic: vibe coding, audience segmentation, optimisation of attention. British filmmaker Adam Curtis [5] has long argued that contemporary media environments encourage us to prioritise the feeling of a situation over understanding its actual causes, producing a continuous wash of perception and affect. In the studio, surrendering to process feels generative, a deliberate immersion, in contrast to platforms engineered to smooth over tension and keep attention flowing at the expense of reflection or structural understanding.
In my Adelaide Biennial works, Yard and Ramp, attention becomes structural. These works are architectures of experience, designed to mediate movement and guide behaviour, making perceptual and algorithmic systems real while revealing their impotence. Yard reproduces a human-scale livestock race: viewers are given the choice to walk through two blind paths, a technique borrowed from animal handling, where neither path immediately reveals its end. Guiding, decorative arrows and the spangled, scratched surfaces of galvanised steel reflect the participant’s blurred image. Both paths lead to the same outcome, sorting participants into an unknown category, like the flow of a segmented audience and the logic of algorithmic attention. [6]
Jennifer Mathews, Yard, 2025, stainless steel, galvanised steel, 284 x 860 x 746 cm (irreg.). Image courtesy the artist and Art Gallery of South Australia. Photo: Saul Steed.
My interest isn’t in technology as a tool, but how the logic of systems can be embodied in architectural form. Designed environments, whether digital protocols or built spaces, operate as fields of attention, circulating through bodies and material. Art can inhabit these flows, ripple through them and make them legible.
In this sense, digital and physical, online and sculptural, exist along a spectrum where perception, behavior and affect are always systemically entangled.
[1] ‘In the last century, Earth has grown this artificial crust, through which it has realized incipient forms of animal–machinic cognition with terraforming-scale agency.’ Benjamin H. Bratton, ‘Antikythera’, Antikythera Digital Journal, 10 May 2025, https://research.antikythera.org/ (accessed 11 April 2026).
[2] Daniel Felstead with Jenn Leung ‘Welcome To Jankspace, Babes’, dis.art https://dis.art/welcome-to-jankspace (accessed 11 April 2026).
[3] Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, cavvia.net, n.d., https://cavvia.net/junkspace/ (accessed 11 April 2026).
[4] ‘Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception.’ Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, Random House, New York, 1967, p. 68.
[5] ‘There is a ring of two dimensional images and sounds all around us that prevents us from seeing the future.’Adam Curtis, S1, E158, ‘Adam Curtis on AI, the BBC and Bucks Fizz’, The Rest Is Entertainment, podcast, 18 June 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM9hRuy31JA (accessed 11 April 2026).
[6] ‘Audience segmentation’, Wikipedia, 26 November 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_segmentation (accessed 4 March 2025).