Simulacra

On Thursday 9 November, Monica Lim accompanied by Angus Donald will perform live between 1 and 2pm! FREE, everyone is welcome to drop in!

Join us for a thought-provoking exhibition at the Grainger Museum, where we delve into the age of simulacra and the intricate relationship between identity and replication. In a world where versions of ourselves are created, multiplied, and shared without our knowledge or consent, the fear of losing our humanness looms large. Are the encounters we have real or merely symbols of what was once real?

Simulacra draws inspiration from the Grainger Museum's vast collection and Percy Grainger's musical output, both of which feature recurring themes of simulacra, copying, and repetition. From multiple iterations of compositions to countless copies of letters and archival documents, we explore how replication has permeated every aspect of our lives.

As part of the Grainger Museum’s Creative Research in Residence program, Simulacra is an amalgamation between resident researcher Monica Lim, the Grainger Museum and students from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA Dance and the School of Computing and Information Systems in much the same way that Artificial Intelligence is the amalgamation of many peoples’ bodies, knowledge, thoughts and creativity.

This residency thinks deeply about AI in the creative arts and more broadly in society, speculating about its promise of freedom to reach new artistic frontiers, in contrast to the risk of accelerating a monoculture in a feedback cycle of data scraping, copying and regenerating. Grainger’s legacy of retranslating folk songs and other composer’s works, and producing multiple versions of his own work, drew parallels to technology being used to ‘preserve and embalm’ our everyday life, then producing multiple created selves in our social media feed and big data models.

FREE, all welcome!

Biography
Monica is a Melbourne-based sound artist, researcher and composer. She is interested in cross-disciplinary forms and the intersection of new technologies with music. Her work spans and combines theatre, contemporary dance, installations, video, ensemble performance, Extended Reality, AI and gaming technology, and has been presented at Arts House, AsiaTOPA, Science Gallery Melbourne, White Night, Melbourne Fringe, Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, Liquid Architecture and Arts Centre Melbourne as well as international symposiums such as ISEA (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) and NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). She has worked extensively in cross-cultural collaborations, particularly with artists from Southeast Asia, with a deep curiosity about cultural traditions and their potential collision with new technologies in order to break down false divisions between traditional/new media art.

Monica is currently undertaking her PhD in Interactive Composition at the University of Melbourne, researching the body as a site for participatory sound-making. She is part of the research team at VCA Dance’s TrakLAB and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics. Within the community, Monica serves on the boards of the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Substation and Liquid Architecture and is co-founder of Project Eleven, a philanthropic initiative which supports the contemporary arts.