Sean Dockray

Sean Dockray is an artist and writer whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and AAAARG.ORG. Sean is on the Board of Directors of the Melbourne non-profit arts organisation, West Space.

His written essays address topics such as artificial intelligence (Artlink), online education (Frieze), the militarisation of universities (in Contestations: Learning from Critical Experiments in Education), book scanning (Fillip), traffic control (Cabinet), and radio (Volume).

The Public School (for Architecture), in partnership with common room, was awarded The New York Prize Fellowship by the Van Alen Institute and was supported by the performance biennial, Performa. As a research fellow at the Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University, he explored the physical infrastructure of the sharing economy, focusing on Facebook's northern European datacenter.

His practice-led PhD at the University of Melbourne, Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident investigated how artists might stage encounters with the algorithms driving our post-industrial, big-data-based, automatic society. Through a series of expanded lecture performances, it seeks to discover ways in which to advance new critical positions within a totalizing technical apparatus whose very design preempts it. Between reappraisals of generative art and glitch - two approaches favored by technologically engaged artists - this project identifies “not working” as both accident and a condition of labour under automation. The research offers an expanded notion of the essay, understood not as a form confined to the printed page but as a methodology expanded to lecture performances, installations, videos, chatbots, and neural networks, where writing, scripting, and coding interweave. Such essays collapse distanced description in order to set the algorithmic machines into motion. (2021)

Writings

• with Steve Rowell and Fiona Whitton, "Blocking All Lanes: Sig-Alerts, Detection Loops, and the Management of Traffic", Cabinet 17: "Laughter", Spring 2005.
• "The Scan and the Export", Fillip 12: "Critical Forms of Publicness", 2010, pp 98-111.
• with Matteo Pasquinelli, Jason Smith and Caleb Waldorf (The Public School Los Angeles), "There is Nothing Less Passive Than the Act of Fleeing", ...ment 1: "Welfare State", 2010, PDF.
• "Interface, Access, Loss", in Undoing Property?, eds. Marysia Lewandowska and Laurel Ptak, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013, pp 183-194.
• "Openings and Closings", in Contestations: Learning From Critical Experiments in Education, eds. Tim Ivison and Tom Vandeputte, Bedford Press, 2013. Commentary by Jacqueline Bell. [1]
• with Lawrence Liang, "Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries", e-flux 65, May 2015; http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/ repr.], e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale, 14 Aug 2015.
• "Fake News, Artificial Intelligence and Data Visualisation", Artlink 37:1, Adelaide: Artlink Australia, Mar 2017.
• "README.md", hyperreadings, Feb 2018.
• with Benjamin Forster, "README.md", Hyperreadings, 15 Feb 2018; repr. in Distributed, eds. David Blamey and Brad Haylock, London: Open Editions, 2018, pp 198-213.
• "Learning from YouTube", in Rivers of Emotion, Bodies of Ore, Oslo: Not Yet Titled Press, and Trondheim: Kunsthall Trondheim, 2018. [2]
• "Artificial Imagination: Deepfakes from Latent Space", Artlink, 1 Dec 2018.
• Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident, Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2019, 146 pp. PhD dissertation. [3]
• "AI-Commune", c.2019. [4] [5]

• with James Parker and Joel Stern, "(Against) the coming world of listening machines", in Machine Listening: A Curriculum, 2020.
  • "(Gegen) die kommende Welt hörender Maschinen", in Acoustic Intelligence. Hören und Gehorchen, eds. Anna Schürmer, Maximilian Haberer, and Tomy Brautschek, Düsseldorf University Press, 2022, pp 41-46. Publisher. (German)

• with James Parker and Joel Stern, "Lessons in how (not) to be heard", in Machine Listening: A Curriculum, 2020.
  • "Lektionen, wie man (nicht) gehört wird", in Acoustic Intelligence. Hören und Gehorchen, eds. Anna Schürmer, Maximilian Haberer, and Tomy Brautschek, Düsseldorf University Press, 2022, pp 183-188. Publisher. (German)

• with James Parker and Joel Stern, "Listening with the pandemic", in Machine Listening: A Curriculum, 2020.

• with James Parker and Joel Stern, "Machine Listening", in Intermission, Unsound, 2020. [6]

• with James Parker and Joel Stern, "Improvisation and control", in Machine Listening: A Curriculum, 2021.
  • "Improvisation und Kontrolle", in Acoustic Intelligence. Hören und Gehorchen, eds. Anna Schürmer, Maximilian Haberer, and Tomy Brautschek, Düsseldorf University Press, 2022, pp 215-226. Publisher. (German)

• with James Parker, "’All possible sounds’: speech, song, and the emergence of machine listening", Sound Studies, Apr 2023. DOI.

more

• Publications on Academia.edu
• See also publications in Aaaaarg and The Public School

Interviews

• David Elliott, "Interview with Sean Dockray / The Public School", May 2009?.
• Julian Myers, "Four Dialogues 2: On AAAARG", Open Space blog, San Francisco: SFMOMA, 26 Aug 2009.
• Morgan Currie, "Small is Beautiful: a discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray", Masters of Media blog, University of Amsterdam, 5 Jan 2010.
• Vivian Ziherl, "The Future And The Public School. Interview", un. Magazine 4:2 (2010), pp 22-26, PDF.
• Randall Szott, "Sean Dockray Interview", 127 Prince, 4 Oct 2010.
• Matthew Fuller, "In the Paradise of Too Many Books: An Interview with Sean Dockray", Mute, London, 4 May 2011.
• Mobility Shifts, video interview, 2011.
• [Federico Campagna], "Interview with AAAAARG.org", in We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion, eds. Auto Italia, 2011, pp 17-18, ARG. [7]
• "Partials That Can Circulate. Sean Dockray, Founder of Aaarg.org Interviewed by Charles Stankievitch", in Ex Libris: Commonplace Books, Berlin: K. Verlag, 2013, pp 1-2, ARG. Conducted via email in Jul/Aug 2013. [8]
• Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik, Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn and Dmitry Vilensky, "Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with AAAAARG, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural", New Formations 78 (Aug 2013), pp 157-178.
• Cornelia Sollfrank, "Expanded Appropriation", video interview with Sean Dockray including transcription and introduction, part of Giving What You Don't Have 2013.
• Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, "The Practice of Sharing Knowledge, Interview with Sean Dockray", Mar 2019, 28 min. Video. Conducted Oct 2017 at HEK, Zurich. Part of the Creating Commons project.
• "Inhuman Intelligence: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst in conversation with Sean Dockray", ed. Emile Frankel, Disclaimer, Jun 2020, 73 min. Video with edited transcript; realised Jan 2020.

See also

• Shadow libraries

Links

• Website
• Mastodon: https://post.lurk.org/@spd
• Machine Listening
• This Hideous Replica, exhibition curated by Joel Stern and Sean Dockray, 2024. Booklet PDF.
• Twitter
• https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/artists/sean-dockray
• http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-June/004558.html
• http://www.memoryoftheworld.org/people/sean-dockray/
• Profile on Australian National U