The 8th Transdisciplinary Conference at the Intersections of Art, Science, and Culture, themed

The Material Image

to be launched soon.


The Studio for Transdisciplinary Arts Research (STAR) is an initiative of Honorary Professor Paul Thomas associated with the Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

STAR incorporates a conference series, symposiums, publications, workshops and various events.

The conference series

Transdisciplinary Imaging Conferences was instigated by Honorary Professor Paul Thomas in 2010. The first conference took place at Artspace in Sydney in 2010, where the conference theme was to question what art was adding to the discourse of the image. The 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 intermedia aesthetics and interdisciplinary pedagogy.

Mediation and the new media arts have 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. Conference proceedings were published on linked and selected papers were also published in the Artspace journal Column.

The second conference took place in Melbourne in 2012, where the notion of ‘Interference’ was posed as an antagonism between production and seduction, as a redirection of affect, or as an untapped potential for repositioning artistic critique. Maybe art doesn’t have to work as a wave that displaces or reinforces the standardized protocols of data/messages but could instead function as a kind of signal that disrupts and challenges perceptions. The full conference papers for ‘Interference Strategies’ were published online. Selected papers were edited by: Lanfranco Aceti and Paul Thomas and published by Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 20 Issue 2.

The third conference entitled Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics was ambitiously located in Istanbul in 2014 to draw from an additional international dialogue. The conference posed questions about the cloud as a new formation of data as a global and seemingly immaterial distribution of storage and means of retrieval. As with the protocols of bit torrent files, the cloud provides a new concept of sound and image “assembly”, distinct from and beyond the materialist machinic diagrams and the practices of re-mixing or remediation that became characteristic of late twentieth-century and millennial aesthetics. The cloud is not an object but an experience, and its particles are the very building blocks of a molecular aesthetic in which we live and act. Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics is an open-access book by Leonardo Electronic Almanac edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. It is published by MIT Press with the support of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR) and Goldsmiths, University of London.

The fourth conference focused on the Atemporal Image to examine whether our contemporary quotidian lives are becoming increasingly indebted to virtual platforms for social exchange and cultural mediation. The ubiquity of social media has necessitated the birth of virtual graveyards; frozen digital reliquaries marking the cessation of our online busywork. Museums and culture conservationists are hurriedly digitising material fragments of the Anthropocene in an anxious contest against time and entropy. The Atemporal conference papers were published in Ubiquity an international, double-blind peer-reviewed journal for creative and transdisciplinary practitioners interested in technologies, practices and behaviours that have the potential to radically transform human perspectives on the world

The fifth conference in the series took place in April 2018 hosted by The University of Edinburgh, led by the Centre for Design Informatics, and supported by EFI. The conference investigated concepts related to the Latent Image, with international keynote speakers Karen Barad (science), Jan Willem Tulp (data visualization), and Edward Colless (art theory) driving the discourse around the Latent Image.

The sixth Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science, and Culture; The Dark Eden conference, comprised three stimulating days of keynote lectures and presentations by over sixty international professionals, including creative arts practitioners, media artists, science and technology researchers, designers, curators, historians, critics, and theorists, presenting new and innovative work exploring the theme of Dark Eden. Our distinguished keynote speakers Timothy Morton, Laura Marks and Barbara Bolt covered diverse topics such as beauty, cognition, freedom, media consumption, magic, performativity, matter, embodied imaging, contemporaneity and human and non-human agents, to touch lightly on their compelling provocations. The conference theme is “Is the Dark Eden a Counter-Enlightenment? Is it a shadow zone, a spectral landscape, a cemetery or a zombieland? Is it the debris of an image culture, or does it provide the material for a new culture?”

The Seventh Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science, and Culture: The Nomadic Image took place in Kyrgyzstan and hosted University of Central Asia on its Naryn campus, and co-chaired by Soheil Ashrafi, University of Central Asia, and Michael Garbutt, University of New South Wales, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture

STAR Education

Transdisciplinary Art Education collaborated with the Leonardo Education and Arts Forum to explore new teaching paradigms that address the questions raised by science and technology. The emergence of new technologies, social media and a multicultural worldview requires a transdisciplinary approach to education in creative arts, design, and media. To tackle the challenges of the 21st century, fine arts must embrace transdisciplinary learning, teaching, and assessment techniques that combine knowledge from art, science, and technology. This project aims to develop new knowledge-creation methods that span across the traditional boundaries of art, science, and technology, and challenge traditional educational models that rely on isolated disciplines. These models were increasingly subject to critical and creative challenges, particularly when dealing with complex and interconnected problems that involve chance, discontinuity, and materiality. The project also aims to encourage stakeholders to reconsider the role, activities, and value of Art and Design Schools that work at the intersection of Art, Science and Technology within a university context. It shared case studies of innovative cloud curriculum design and documentation with national and international Higher Education communities.

Paul Thomas