Creative technology beyond AI hype – Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker

What happens when we slow down, make things ourselves and ask who our tools are really built to serve? Nyungar artist and technologist Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker joined SLV LAB in June 2026 to discuss why the future of technology should not be treated as inevitable, particularly amid pressure to embe…

A new era for orphan works in Australia – Elliott Bledsoe [lecture recording]

In this Creative Technologist Talk, Elliott Bledsoe explored Australia’s new orphan works copyright scheme and what it might mean for cultural organisations and their publics. Alongside its timely discussion of the new legislation, Elliott's talk provides a helpful introduction to copyright and orp…

The social life of mixed reality – Yoyo Munk

How can mixed reality technologies create emergent social experiences? Scientist-artist Yoyo Munk (US) joined SLV's Paula Bray and CEO Paul Duldig to discuss blending virtual geometries with shared physical space in their recent KAGAMI and Medusa projects. Yoyo asks how technological imperfections …

Building better AI speech tech with global voices – Kathy Reid

Voice assistants and auto-captions are everywhere now, but they can quickly fall apart when someone speaks with an accent the system wasn’t trained to recognise, or in a language it rarely “hears”.  In this episode of the SLV LAB Conversations podcast, we were joined by technologist, linguist and …

Mapping Planetary AI – Kate Crawford [lecture recording]

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems pull data from across the internet, library databases and our online presence, it generates a significant change in our relationship with knowledge. But what do we really know about this pervasive technology? Do our societies have robust guardrails in place t…

How AI can help libraries – Ines Vodopivec [lecture recording]

“Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s not going to go away. We can hate it, we can refuse it, we can have doubts. But it’s here – and maybe we can use it for our own purposes and our own workflows in our institutions.” Dr Ines Vodopivec is convinced that AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn’t a novelt…

Three decades of hacking and history – Tim Sherratt

From the dial‑up days of 1993 to today’s data‑rich cultural landscape, historian and technologist Tim Sherratt has been rewiring how we see public collections. In this SLV Lab Conversation with State Library Victoria's Chief Digital Officer Paula Bray, Tim retraces a 30-year career so far shaped by…

Mapping colonial bushfires through historical newspapers – Fiannuala Morgan

We caught up with Dr Fiannuala (Finn) Morgan to talk about her fascinating project, Historic Fires Near Me – an experimental visualisation of nineteenth century bushfire reporting which forms part of her ongoing research reconstructing Australian bushfire records from 1850 to 1900. The idea was spa…

Creating a more accessible online world – Scott Hollier

There's a common misconception that assistive technologies only benefit a few – namely those with special access needs. However, innovations like voice assistants, text-to-speech and captions are things most of us use everyday, and at some point in our lives we or someone we know will rely on assis…

Rethinking Ethics in the Age of AI – Vanessa Bartlett & Jasmin Pfefferkorn

Galleries. Libraries. Archives. Museums. Every day, artists and cultural workers face tough ethical calls on AI. Could artists show us a new way forward? What if ethics wasn’t about ticking boxes, but about how we act, care and respond in the moment? In their new book Decentring Ethics: AI art as …