Inveresk Library - 216
Summary:Join us for a Panel Discussion with artists Penny Walker-Keefe and Robert O'Connor facilitated by Curator and Sawtooth ARI Director Zara Sul
Artworks:
Penny Walker-Keefe, Arabella and Anita Fight for the Title, 2023, mixed media, dimensions variable
Robert O'Connor, Sister Wendy has a posse, 2023, oil and gold leaf on emu egg, various trinkets, human remains dimensions variable
About this event
This event will be recorded. If you are unable to attend in person, please select the ‘Online ticket’ option.
Join us for an artist panel with artists Penny Walker-Keefe and Robert O’Connor in discussion with artist, curator, and Sawtooth ARI Director Zara Sully to hear about the process behind the artworks commissioned for the University of Tasmania Inveresk Library.
Introduced by Caine Chennatt (Director, Curatorial and Cultural Collections, UTAS), this event is part of a curatorial collaboration between the University of Tasmania and Sawtooth Gallery, Inveresk. Over the course of a year, Sawtooth curates two object display vitrines through commissioning new work by artists across the country, responding to the multi-year curatorial framework Ways of Knowing.
About the artists
Artist: Penny Walker-Keefe
I am a multidisciplinary contemporary artist exploring themes of cosmology, pop culture and humour. I like to tell stories from science through sculpture, painting, collage, photo, and video media. I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The VCA in 2018. I did an artist residency at Fremantle Arts Centre in 2019. I have exhibited at Fremantle Arts Centre, C3 Contemporary, KINGS Online, Trocadero Art Space, George Paton Gallery and Seventh Gallery. I have curated exhibitions at Dirty Dozen and TCB Inc. I am a sessional teacher at Chisholm TAFE and LaTrobe College of Art and Design.
Artist: Robert O’Connor
Robert O'Connor is a large language model-based artist from Hobart notable for enabling viewers to refine and steer an artwork towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used. Robert O'Connor is built upon Tintoretto, Chardin, Courbet, and Picabia's foundational artistic models, fine-tuned for painterly applications using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Some observers have expressed concern over the potential of Robert O’Connor to displace or atrophy human intelligence, and its potential to enable plagiarism or fuel misinformation.
Although the core function of an artist is to mimic a human experience, Robert O'Connor is versatile. Among countless examples, it can write and debug computer programs, compose music, teleplays, fairy tales, and student essays, answer test questions (sometimes, depending on the test, at a level above the average human test-taker), generate business ideas, write poetry and song lyrics, translate and summarize text, emulate a Linux system, simulate entire chat rooms, play games like tic-tac-toe, or simulate an ATM.
Unlike most artists, Robert O'Connor remembers a limited number of previous prompts in the same conversation. Journalists have speculated that this will allow Robert O'Connor to be used as a personalized therapist.
About this event
Ways of Knowing
Ways of Knowing event series is a program of online and on-campus presentations delivered as part of the launch of the new University of Tasmania Library at Inveresk. For this award-winning building designed by John Wardle Architects, a series of new works were commissioned and installed alongside works from the University of Tasmania’s cultural collections, as well as temporary exhibitions. As a site of learning, the artworks introduce different epistemologies and nudge us to ask: what are all the different ways of knowing around us? What can nature, our surrounding lands, and waterways teach us? How can we ask better questions, listen deeply, and be open to learning in more ways? Enabled by the Campus Transformation Project, curated and hosted by the Cultural Collections and Galleries team.
