In 2010, I arrived in Sydney to take a position as Associate Professor, head of painting at the College of Fine Art, Sydney. Coming from a more experimental media art and science background, I was interested in how art was absorbing these seemingly different areas and the epistemological effect they were having. The technologies have now become ubiquitous, but then I was interested in exploring how emerging technologies were affecting our understanding conceptually and materially of the image. What we were adding to the ongoing concept and critique of imaging the world. To advance some of this reasoning, I founded the International Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference at the intersections between art, science, and culture. I asked Su Baker from the Victorian College of the Arts to Co-Chair the first of the conference series, which has finally come to an end after the publication of this final anthology of papers entitled The Material Image.

Below is the premise formulated by Edward Colless and myself in 2010. Colless also played a part in shaping and enriching the formulation of subsequent conferences, whilst participating as a delegate. This initial premise is cited in full to situate a line of questioning from a transdisciplinary perspective that became the cornerstone of the ensuing conference series:

A profound shift is occurring in our understanding of postmodern media culture. Since the turn of the millennium, the emphasis on mediation as technology and as aesthetic idiom, as opportunity for creative initiatives and for critique, has become increasingly normative and doctrinaire. Mediation and the new media arts have in fact become the new medium of critical and pedagogical discourse: like water is for fish, like culture is for cultural studies, mediation is a concept that is taken for granted now because it is itself the medium in which we think and act, in which we swim. We need a concept that is amphibian, and that can leave its medium. The concept we propose is a remediated apprehension of the image: an active image and activity of imaging beyond the boundaries of disciplinary definition but also altering the relations of intermedia aesthetics and interdisciplinary pedagogy. This concept will need to incorporate a vibrant materialism of the image’s sensory and cognitive strata and an evanescent immaterialism of its affective qualities. Rather than locate our conference in the space of negotiation between disciplines or media (the “inter-“), we propose the opposition, transit, and surpassing of the interdisciplinary by a “transdisciplinary aesthetics”, and its conceptual and physical practice of a “transdisciplinary imaging.” The aim of the conference is to bring together artists, scholars, scientists, historians, and curators.

By forming themes that were to emerge from the first iteration of the conference to this, the final instalment. Like some nagging doubts that were pertinent to a prophetic mission to capture a quintessential question, what was transpiring in art nationally and internationally. In other words, ideas derived from the conferences that were highlighted for further attention: ‘New Imaging: transdisciplinary strategies for art beyond the new media’ (Sydney), ‘Interference Strategies’ (Melbourne), ‘Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics’ (Istanbul), ‘The Atemporal Image’ (Plymouth), ‘The Latent Image’ (Edinburgh), ‘Dark Eden’ (Sydney), ‘Nomadic Image’ (Naryn), and ‘The Material Image’ (Sydney).

Each of the conference themes created their own ineffable journey of intentions that are referenced below to give a taste of each line of thinking.

The initial concept proposed was a remediated apprehension of the image: an active image and activity of imaging beyond the boundaries of disciplinary definition but also altering the relations of transmedia aesthetics and transdisciplinary pedagogy. This led to whether the conception of interference strategies could be posed as an antagonism between production and seduction, a redirection of affect, or as an untapped potential for repositioning artistic critique. This critique was given an atomistic direction with cloud and molecular aesthetics providing a new concept of sound and image “assembly”, distinct from and beyond the materialist machinic diagrams and the practices of re-mixing or remediation. The metaphorical bits brought about questions of how a new atemporality informs and plays out across contemporary visual culture. When our contemporary quotidian lives were becoming increasingly indebted to virtual platforms for social exchange and cultural mediation. The latent image born from this collapse referred to the underlying need to deal with translation and reconstitution of information that underpins all analogue and digital imaging as it negotiates with a transient reality.

This cornucopia and unprecedented availability of mediated imagery was not seen as Eden, but a dark Eden, metaphorically fertile as a forest that is so thick with its tentacular edicts that any light that penetrates cannot escape its web; or perhaps, that its mutated growth is now dependent on finding a way through the blackness to a new enlightenment. The search for a new enlightenment from the forest of saturated images led to a nomadic potential. Where the nomad pursues pure lines of flight across the steppe, desert, or ocean: smooth, continually shifting spaces that stand in opposition to the striated, enclosed world of the settled state. Similarly, images traverse and produce unbounded, uncharted spaces whose circumference shifts, expands, and dissolves. To enable a comprehension of nomadic territorialisation, a new material image becomes flesh in the increasing prominence across a terrain of diverse disciplines. Where the advent of new scientific insights and imaging technologies transformed our understanding of what it means to internalise, make, express, and critique our imaged world.

The original question came to natural completion after eight biannual conferences. The conference series were well documented in publications that revealed evidence of the questions with insightful text that described a total reconsideration of the image. The publications are records of thinking about the image for future researchers to reference and unpack.

Reference conference proceedings

New Imaging: transdisciplinary strategies for art beyond the new media, 2010

Conference hosted at Artspace, Sydney. Chairs Su Baker, Paul Thomas. 
Edited papers: Column 7 New Imaging: Transdisciplinary Strategies for Art beyond the New Media, Publisher: Artspace; Sydney, Australia.

Interference Strategies, 2012

Hosted at Victorian College for the Arts, Sydney. Chairs, Su Baker, Paul Thomas
Interference Strategies: Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 20, No. 2, Publisher: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014.

Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics, 2014

Hosted by Pera Museum, Istanbul. Chairs, Lanfranco Aceti, Associate Professor Paul Thomas
Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: LEA / MIT Press, 2017.

The Atemporal Image, 2016

i-Dat Plymouth University, Chairs, Mike Philips, Paul Thomas.
Ubiquity Journal of Pervasive Media Issue 1, Vol. 5, 2016.

The Latent Image, 2018

Hosted by Edinburgh University, Chairs Chris Speed, Paul Thomas
Transdisciplinary image. figshare. Journal contribution. 2018.

Dark Eden, 2020

Hosted by University of New South Wales, Chairs, David Eastwood, Chelsea Lehmann and Paul Thomas.
Publisher: Art + Australia, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. 2022.

The Nomadic Image, 2022

Soheil Ashrafi, Michael Garbutt and Paul Thomas.
Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Southbank VIC 3006.

The Material Image, 2024

Hosted by National Art School, Sydney, Chairs, Ben Denham, Dr Chelsea Lehmann, Dr Elizabeth Pulie and Paul Thomas.
Publisher: Art + Australia, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. 2022