24/06/2026
As DARK PLATES comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what I found most powerful about the project.
https://darkplates.art/
DARK PLATES was developed for my DJ set at Dark M**o and as part of my PhD research. During the festival, it generated 48 artworks, drawing from endangered Tasmanian species, colonial image histories, public data, audience messages, news, and cultural signals.
The image generation phase has now finished, but the work will remain online for a while longer. There are still QR stickers around Hobart, and people can continue to open the artworks, ask questions, and leave messages.
For me, the most meaningful part was talking to the artworks.
Each image carries its own provenance, source material, prompts, accession-style data, public annotations, and conversational history. Over time, the work began to feel less like a set of AI images and more like a living archive.
The conversations created a record of how people encountered the work. Questions, jokes, memories, doubts, ecological concerns, political unease, and local knowledge all became part of the collection.
For me, it felt like a geological survey of digital culture. Layer by layer, public signals, historical records, audience responses, and machine interpretation accumulated into an archive that could be explored through conversation.
The prompt structure itself began to operate like a collection management system. It was not simply generating images. It was organising relationships between species, histories, places, events, people, and ideas.
That has changed how I think about archives, collections, and culture. A collection does not only need to be searched. It can be spoken with.
If you have a few minutes, I’d love you to contribute while the work is still open.
Open an artwork.
Ask it a question.
Leave it a message or comment.
Explore its provenance and source material.
Every conversation becomes part of the archive.
https://darkplates.art/
Thank you to everyone who visited the work at Wormhole, spoke with the artworks, left messages, and helped shape this experiment in archives, AI, ecology, public memory, and machine-mediated culture.
**o
