ISBN 978-0-6455443-0-5 
283 pages | Softcover | B&W images 
28mm H x 215mm W 
RRP $15.92 (inc GST) 
2022

Editors: Paul Thomas, Edward Colless, David Eastwood, Chelsea Lehmann
Authors: Lisa Andrew; Carolyn Angleton; Julie Louise Bacon; Vanessa Bartlett; Brogan Bunt; Lauren Collee; Edward Colless; David Eastwood; Cameron Edmond and Tomasz Bednarz; Michael Garbutt and Nico Roenpagel; Mitch Goodwin; Chris Henschke; Peter Hill; Malcolm Johnson; Rosemary Lee; Chelsea Lehmann; Stephen Loo; The Ghosts of Nothing (aka Sean Lowry and Ilmare Taimre); Miška Mandić; David Manley; Laura U. Marks; Louis Mason; Nobuhiro Masuda, Juppo Yokokawa, Kazuhiro Jo, and Yosaku Matsutani; Nancy Mauro-Flude; Katherine Moline, Angela Goddard, Amanda Hayman and Troy Casey, and Beck Davis; Thomas Moran with stills by Liam Vaughan; Timothy Morton; Stuart Nolan; Katie Paine; Warren Parry; Andrew Patrizio; Ana Peraica; Elizabeth Pulie; Diego Ramirez; Margaret Roberts; Szilvia Ruszev; Paul Thomas; Mark Titmarsh; Julie Vulcan; Clea T. Waite.

The cultural movement and moment now dubbed simply but absolutely as ‘Contemporary’ is defined by the networked saturation of images: fullness, dissemination and inundation of frictionless image production, image hacking, image consumption and image commerce on social media and in platform capitalism; of 24/7 crisis news and uncritical web influencers; of CCTV and drone surveillance; of massive multiplayer online gaming; of ‘deepfake’ hoaxes and simulations that augment reality and contribute to the relentlessly cynical campaigning of our 21st-century political Twitter ‘newspeak’. Is not this cornucopia and unprecedented availability of mediated imagery a kind of Eden?

This collection of essays evolved out of The Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture, held in Sydney and online (6-8 November 2020). Amid the backdrop of a global pandemic, social unrest and the unfolding 2020 US election results, the conference theme of ‘Dark Eden’ elicited a range of passionate discussion and debate regarding the fate and contours of image culture in what had been a dark year. Expanding on the conference themes, this publication features a selection of delegates who were invited to develop their presentations for this volume. The essays collected here include texts by creative arts practitioners, media artists, science and technology researchers, designers, curators, historians, critics and theorists who present new and innovative scholarship investigating the potentialities of the image and the fate and contours of image culture in times of ‘darkness’.