The Material Image, the eighth Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference at the intersections of art, science and culture, was held at the National Art School, Sydney, from 1–3 November 2024. Convened in hybrid format, the conference brought together artists, theorists, and thinkers to reflect on what images are and what they do in a time when digital media saturates daily life, and materialist thought has regained momentum.

The conference arrived at a moment of transformation in the ways we engage with, produce, and interpret images across multiple domains, with new imaging technologies challenging and revolutionising the way images act upon and within them. The premise was clear: contemporary visualisation technologies have unsettled our assumptions about the nature of images. No longer confined to canvas or celluloid, images now circulate across pigments, fibers, sensors, code, and data streams. Conference participants probed what it means to speak of a ‘material image’ when images appear both tangible and ephemeral, embedded in physical processes yet dispersed across networks.

Materialisms in context

New materialist frameworks, emphasising flux and human/non-human entanglements, have become influential across the humanities and creative practice. Yet the optimism of such approaches is challenged by current conditions: the aftereffects of a global pandemic, accelerating climate crises, rapid incursions of AI, and resurgent geopolitical conflict. These realities force a reassessment of how materialist theories intersect with lived experience.

Against this backdrop, contributors to The Material Image asked how art and technology might together probe materiality and immateriality. Can creative practice reveal new ways of navigating ecological collapse or technological opacity? How might images both participate in and critique the systems that shape contemporary life? A sense of the image as ‘material’ forms here a locus around which we might consider its expanded potential across multiple domains.

A spectrum of approaches

What emerged was a view of the image as multiple and contested—ranging from traces and residues on paper or clay to algorithmic simulations and immersive environments. Papers highlighted human/non-human entanglements, the ecological dimensions of material practice, hybrid intersections of digital and analogue media, and the role of images in carrying myths and misinformation in a post-digital world.

By working across these domains, presenters emphasised that images are not only visual artefacts but also processes that involve touch, storage, circulation, and memory. Practice-led research was foregrounded as a way of generating knowledge, showing how the act of making images itself produces insights that theory alone cannot. The inclusion of artist talks ensured that the voice of the maker was present, lending the proceedings a sense of lived experience, experimentation and reflection.

The conference’s embrace of early-career researchers equally informed the sessions with fresh perspectives and a critical energy. By welcoming voices at the threshold of their practice, the conference cultivated a diverse and inclusive community, with speculative research and emergent practice not only valued but foregrounded.

Curating the publication

This volume offers a curated selection of papers rather than a full proceedings. Our rationale was to capture the range of voices and approaches that best exemplify the conference’s concerns: theoretical reflections, practice-led investigations, established thinkers, and emerging scholars. Each contribution has been peer reviewed and edited to speak both to the event and to a wider audience engaged in art/science/technology discourse. The papers address common themes that arose from the conference itself, grouped around the concerns of the image and material ecologies; data visualisation; technology; and performance and materiality.

Together, these papers trace a trajectory from conceptual to situated practices. They illuminate how images can both reinforce and challenge dominant narratives, and how creative practices of imaging can open new avenues for thinking critically about materiality. This publication chronicles the exploration of this potential, forming a record of scholarly and creative exchange and giving testament to the relevance of the material turn in considering a world increasingly shaped by images.

Continuing the conversation

The Material Image affirms that images remain central to how we understand and inhabit the world. At a time when visual culture is inseparable from questions of ecology, technology, and politics, the image becomes a site of negotiation: between matter and data, visibility and opacity, presence and absence.

The works collected here exemplify that negotiation. They remind us that art is not simply reflective but generative, offering modes of knowing and imagining that are essential for navigating our complex present. As the echoes of the conference reverberate outward, it is hoped that this publication serves as a catalyst for further inquiry, collaboration, and innovation.

This introduction leads to a closing reflection by series founder Paul Thomas, who situates this edition within the broader trajectory of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference. His words mark this as both culmination and continuation—part of an ongoing effort to rethink what images are and what they can do at the intersections of art, science, and culture.

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