The elevator doors opened like the top being peeled away on a can of sardines, and at least half a dozen squirming pink bodies blinked out at us, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the absurdly small elevator. They shuffled their feet and pretended not to see me, not to see my wheelchair or the flight of stairs visible through the glass walls. No one got out, but the doors remained open, ignorantly optimistic. After a few awkward seconds, a hand darted out from somewhere in the middle of the group and jabbed the Close button.

In its combination of the already-known, AI cannot respond to the important challenges of our age–climate change, various forms of prejudice, the inequalities of capitalism and settler colonialism, incipient fascisms. We need, more than ever, art and thought that gives us the authentically new, that tells us something about human life beyond the norms of media normativity of tech platforms and billionaire tyrants.

This landscape is not a manifestation of a triumphal struggle over droughts, floods, hardships and Blacks. Rather, it is a refraction of swirling patterns of memory, memorialisation; suppression, repression and revelation; constantly ravelling and unravelling, endlessly struggling to erase or incorporate the Other and soothe the settler pillow.

What the Forest app provides is the illusion that time spent on study, work, or everyday chores can also be creative and community-minded. Moreover, that the tasks of everyday life and work that are typically ephemeral, forgettable, and often of diminishing returns, can—when recorded in productivity trees in the forest of progress—leave a trace, recouping a sense of purpose and significance.

Artists and the arts sector need to take a hard look at the kind of social license we are granting the fossil fuel industry and weigh that up with the contract we have with the audiences and communities we serve.

Dark Mofo has commissioned an artwork that interferes in Indigenous truth-telling in Lutruwita/Tasmania. Dark Mofo has given Santiago Sierra funding and a platform to attempt to act out a violent fantasy on stolen land, one that reinforces the harmful notion that Indigenous bodies, histories and stories are sites of exploitation and extraction. A fantasy of blood-soaked silence to be hung on a wall.

OCCURRENT AFFAIR has been conceived as a ‘collaborative activist gesture, … [addressing] current socio-political, economic and environmental issues, while celebrating the strength, resilience and continuity of Aboriginal culture’. It’s the first exhibition by the proppaNOW Aboriginal artists collective in the last five years.

While researching Nolan’s wartime desertion from the Australian Army, I became intrigued to see a repetitiveness in his depiction of the figure of the Australian soldier – not least in the 252 paintings and drawings collectively known as the Gallipoli Series. I have traced it back to a drawing made by a psychotic patient and given to Nolan by the Melbourne psychiatrist Reg Ellery, who supported his application for release from the Army unit that was about to be sent north to face off the Japanese in New Guinea.

The recent 'painting over' the large mural-esque images that make up much of Hosier Lane's artwork was an important critique of the co-option of street art and a commentary on who ascribes value. Its point was missed by the very people it sought to critique. That Melbourne City Council is now seeking to criminalise those artists demonstrates that their appreciation of street art dissipates when it presents a challenge to their authority.

Within this nuclear reality whose lives are seen as disposable? Whose bodies are rendered collateral? We do not yet have fully functioning artificial intelligence, nor replicants built to carry out the domination and appropriation of invasion. However, colonialism and capitalism have seen to it that androids have been made of humans: dehumanised, worked, hunted and killed. The survivors of apocalypses and nuclear disaster exist and continue to resist.

It is tableau that sprung to mind when I viewed Cameron Hayes’ immensely detailed painting ‘The Fight Between Moomba and Lent’, recently on display at the Australian Galleries in Sydney.

When looking through Liu’s lens, it’s not hard to start searching for the spectral absences that haunt this country. His work urges us to be diligent in seeing, in cautiously determining what and who deserve our ethical concern in the affronting yet normalised landscapes we occupy in an urbanising world.

We watched as the sharply uniformed carabiniere denied access to one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists – and of course, to an Aboriginal man – to the Australian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.

Due to the extensive list of creative geniuses whose deaths were either caused or speculated to have been caused by the dreaded infection, syphilis acquired twisted positive connotations within European artistic circles during the Victorian era.

If the main purpose of my work was to educate white people, I would have seen it as a failure after being rejected twice by white art institutions. I would have seen it as a failure after the predominantly white attendees of the music and arts night drew penises and wrote jokes on my work.

Archiving my psychotic experiences has been a powerful act of restitution and sense-making. For the mad have always been narrated by psychiatry; their creations collected, annotated and curated by institutions and by people who have never experienced madness themselves.