AusSTS 2025: Signals & Noises Workshop Registration

This year’s AusSTS conference is excited to announce that it is partnering with the National Communication Museum to present a day of workshops, art performances, and public events to celebrate their Signal to Noise exhibition, curated by Joel Stern, Eryk Salvaggio, and Emily Siddons.

Learn more and register for Day 1's workshops below. Please select two workshops in total, during session one (12pm - 1pm) and session two (2pm - 3pm). These workshops are for pre-registered conference participants only.

To register for a workshop, add a ticket to your cart and click 'checkout'. The 'member code' section can be ignored.

More information about the AusSTS conference can be found here .

Guanaco: Fine Tuning AI Models and Critical Intervention in LLMs Joel Humphries (RMIT), Christoper O'Neill (Deakin University)

The third animal that follows the pair llama and alpaca is guanaco: A workshop on fine-tuning AI models and the problem of critical intervention in LLMs In 2023, Stanford University researchers released Alpaca, an AI model derived from Meta’s LLaMA and fine-tuned on a synthetic dataset of 52,000 parameters generated by ChatGPT-3. The goal was to address known ‘deficiencies’ in generative AI, particularly its tendency to “generate false information, propagate social stereotypes, and produce toxic language”. However, days later, the model was taken down due to ‘safety issues’, including ‘hallucinating’ falsehoods and generating ‘offensive text’. This workshop critically explores why Alpaca failed and what it means to ‘fine-tune’ an AI model. It unfolds in two parts. First, participants will compare Alpaca’s 175 human-written instructions with ChatGPT’s 52,000, considering how race, gender, and politics differ across datasets. What does this reveal about how LLMs transform human intentionality and political engagements? Next, participants will collaboratively design a new AI model within the camelid family, Guanaco. After discussing selected AI texts, they’ll devise 175 original seed tasks, keeping race, gender and politics front of mind. ChatGPT will generate an additional thousand tasks based on the workshop’s seed set. Participants will examine the relation between seed, generation, and hallucination. Can models be ‘tuned’ beyond their foundational parameters, and what consequences follow in an age of normalised generative AI?

Voyce Walker Joel Stern (RMIT), James Parker (Melbourne Law School), Sean Dockray (Monash University)

A listening session and discussion on imagining a time after techno-capitalism. Voyce Walkr by Machine Listening is a reimagining of Russel Hoban’s post-apocalyptic 1980 novel Riddley Walker, updated, reworked, and distilled in response to our technological present, and then staged at the NCM as an installation for four vintage radios. This multi-channel audio work uses AI cloned speech and analogue synthesiser to create a kind of voice puppetry. It considers themes of manipulation, responsibility and agency, and a scrambling of time. The work recasts Hoban’s nuclear devastation as a collapse brought on by carbon capitalism and techno-solutionism. The environment is ravaged, language has warped and degraded, and computing and other advanced technologies have vanished. Society is now organised around a myth about the causes of the collapse – The User Story – broadcast daily over a rudimentary radio network made from salvaged parts. This is the ‘voyce walking’ of the work’s title. The story is told by a character called a “walker,” who shares strange and powerful tales from a broken world. It mixes old and new ways of storytelling—like puppets, spoken stories, and sounds shaped by machines. It is meant to evoke radio’s various golden age(s) at the same time as the story imagines radio as a crude post-apocalyptic medium, far in the future. Time has been deliberately scrambled. Cloned children tell of coming ‘infomayshun barms’ on vintage radios. Old stories of dystopian futures tuned in to the anxieties of the present.

Aetheric Intervention Jade Boyd (Sydney College of the Arts)

The themes of Jade's work engage with the themes of Environmental signals, Bodily signals, Error as noise and Computational signals. Aetheric Intervention detects environmental noise – the EM signals that float freely, yet unseen, all around us. The body’s own electrical signals affect the surrounding EM fields as it holds the device. This device is connected to a laptop to interpret the signals detected, computing and translating these unseen signals to noise. This noise is repurposed by the listener in this context as an audible electromagnetic landscape, or EM soundscape. Utilising a device known as the 'Spooky Tesla Spirit Radio,' designed after Nikola Tesla’s Crystal Radio and a coil pick-up microphone, 'Aetheric Intervention' works with the idea of detecting energies – specifically, the electromagnetic fields generated by the electronic equipment used in the performance and natural or atmospheric radio. This session consists of a performance followed by a workshop, in which participants can learn how the device works through demonstration and testing. Participants then workshop how the concept of electromagnetic or other machine “noise” may be incorporated into works of their own.

Cosmopolitical Inquiry: Practices of knowing and participating in inter-institutional (inter-epistemic) spaces Matthew Campbell (University of Melbourne)

Inquiry is situated 'in and between' state-based and First Nations knowledge making and doing institutions in contemporary Australia. This positioning recognises that Australian life-ways continue be strongly configured by colonisation. But how might one work with this socially and materially from the ground up? Understanding embodied participants as one vector through which transformations of institutional practices might occur, this workshop will focus through the participants' stories of experiencing in working in inter-institutional (and possibly inter-epistemic) spaces. The workshop seeks participants who are happy to share stories and work with one another to explore the complexities and apories (not knowing how to go on), difficulties and rewards of grappling with one’s own knowing practices-in-practice as members of contemporary knowledge institutions, particularly as we become aware of where and how they rub up against those of others. Growing from the work that takes place in the University of Melbourne’s treaty teaching program, this participatory workshop is minimally designed. It will begin with a brief introduction, setting the scene for the ensuing discussion, which will be guided by some sensitising concepts, including responsibility accountability, and epistemic good faith. The logic driving the workshop is that inquiring into one’s own work in inter-institutional space is necessary if we are to participate responsibly in those spaces.

Finding the signal within the noise – zine making as community building for feminist science and technology Susan Barnes (Macquarie University)

Feminist science and technology offer one alternative to mainstream masculine science and technology culture, and adopting feminist science and technology principles and practices may help organisations rethink their approach to improving the workplace culture for minority scientists and technologists. Research from my PhD suggest that while some Australian scientists and technologists have already adopted feminist science or technology approaches, they do so as “islands” disconnected from each other, or “underground” for fear of being stopped by their institutions. Unofficial places of community and knowledge sharing then become crucial sites of solidarity and information transfer.

This making and doing session is one such place of community, providing an opportunity for conference attendees to engage with the ideas of feminist science and technology principles and practices and share what they know with each other. Come along and make a ‘zine’ (an amateur magazine page), using scrapbooking and found items, while we talk feminist science and technology. No art skills are required, and all the materials are supplied. If the topic speaks to you personally you are welcome to bring something special to include in your zine that can be permanently attached to an A5 page.

Publishing in STS: tips from two editors Kiran Pienaar (Deakin University), Matthew Kearnes (UNSW)

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience is an open access, feminist science studies journal that publishes ‘theoretically inventive and methodologically creative feminist scholarship that spans the social sciences, humanities, and arts’ (4S Infrastructure Award, 2020). Science, Technology, & Human Values (ST&HV) is a leading Science and Technology Studies (STS) journal committed to publishing both field-defining and field-extending work and intervening in a common set of conceptual and topical conversations. In this session, a Catalyst co-editor and ST&HV editor will share some behind-the-scenes insights and advice on journal publishing processes. Beginning with an overview of the journals’ focus and scope, they present some high-level statistics on submissions and highlight what makes these journals distinctive.

The session will cover the journals’ submission and review process, editorial approach, types of submissions, citational ethics, and tips for decoding decision letters and responding to reviews. They will also highlight common issues seen in submissions and how to maximise the chances of having a piece published in these journals. Designed to be interactive, the session will include opportunities for discussion and for participants to speak directly with the editors about potential submissions or raise questions about the journals’ processes. This session aims to demystify the publishing process so if you’re considering submitting to Catalyst or ST&HV and want a view ‘behind the curtain’, come along!

Can we Decolonise Authorship? Leonie Norrington (CDU)

Leonie will tell ontologically-focused ethnographic analytic storiesthat interrupt the desire to understand; read short excerpts from the novel; show posters and videos on a laptops and play recordings of the way Yolngu supervisors legitimated her writing the novel.

Surfacing Urban Water Alexandra Crosby (UTS), Sarah Jane Jones (UTS), Holly O'Neill (UTS)

The climate is changing. How we relate to water in cities has to change too. The visualisation of wetlands and waterways in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it.

In the workshop, participants will learn how to make and use photo diagrams to read, analyse, document, and share watery urban ecologies. This includes the impact of climate change on wetlands and examples of stewardship practices that may otherwise remain illegible. What to bring: Participants are asked to bring to the workshop a photograph (printed or digital) of an urban wetland, waterway, or watery infrastructure in their own work or home neighbourhood.

Make some Visual Noise: Playing with Intaglio Printing Adam Sargent (ANU), V. Chitra (ANU)

This making-and-doing workshop invites participants to explore intaglio printing using found materials. In intaglio, ink is transferred from grooves and inscriptions on one surface onto another, producing a meaningful image. However, when working with found objects, the process becomes more unpredictable—each material carries its own marks, folds, and indentations shaped by time. During this workshop, participants will experiment with printmaking using discarded cartons, packaging, files, and surfaces from their surroundings. Through this process, they will consider how to engage with materials and their histories—reading into textures, making new punctures, scratches, lines, and figures. Intaglio offers a practical way to draw our attention to noises and signals as participants decide how to place new marks in conversation with those already embedded in the material. As they create their prints, participants will explore how these elements overlap and diverge in both material and meaning.