Exhibition opens on Saturday 28 February at 2pm. Please note the gallery will remain closed until exhibition opening begins.
When film and photography first emerged in the early 1900s, it disrupted the exclusive, ritualistic nature of art and shifted its focus to exhibition value. In his seminal 1935 essay, Walter Benjamin suggested that mechanical reproduction, withers the “aura” of an artwork- its unique existence in time and space in the here and now.
Today in an era of digital driven surveillance and AI generation, the threat to aura has shifted from the copy to the calculation. Where mechanical reproduction once detached the object from its tradition, the algorithm seeks to detach the human from their own agency, reducing the “here and now” to a predictable data point. In this landscape of transition to algorithmic synthesis, the aura is no longer lost to the printing press or the film reel, but to the frictionless automation of thought. Alternatum stages an aesthetic intervention against automation, employing a conceptual scaffold that probes and elicits alternative points of view. It encourages a departure from the perspective of digital technologies solely as apparatuses of capitalistic and social control, seeking instead to re-embed the “aura” within the digital circuit.
In our contemporary times, authenticity can be redefined by the trace of human intent. Anna Tow and Willow Ferris’ animation works are created with artistic decisions using software and hand-coding as opposed to AI Generated imagery which harvests collective human history to produce an output. They bear the manual mark of the artist’s hand within digital software, representing a sequence of idiosyncratic human choices.
Dean Qiulin Li’s digital video portrait rejects performative digital culture through its unstaged quality, showing people engaging with the lens within their social environments in the Bankstown area. Authenticity in this work is shaped by capturing real, unscripted moments, transforming digital lens from a tool of surveillance to a medium of human connection.
Thomas Marcusson and Liam Houlihan’s mechanic works – a series of chess clocks, automated bells and self-typing machine function in the exhibition narrative as a re-materialisation of the digital. While controlled by electronics and code, they are anchored in the physical world, their sounds creating a sensory shock that demands immediate presence and attention. Each work questions the relationship between AI systems, automation and the human through its materialisation of the code.
Alternatum proposes that the alternative to digital control is a re-engagement with the tools of the present rather than a retreat into the past of analogue-only systems. By choosing software over synthesis and physical resonance over algorithmic abstraction, the works in the exhibition breathe an aura back into the digital realm. In the age of the algorithm, the most powerful frame is one that allows us to see the authentic trace of the creative human spirit.
Text by Rachael Kiang
Image credits: Progress in Excess (2025), Willow Ferris. 3-channel 3D Animation, 2m29s. Sound design by Linus Ferris.
This exhibition is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
about the artists
Willow Ferris is a media artist working with 3D animation to explore relationships between digital technologies and the human experience. Playing with a mix of real and surreal, she is interested in using computer graphics as a creative medium to abstract real-world subject matter, fostering new relationships with the world around us. Grounded in experimentation, Willow’s practice engages with techniques like procedural modelling to create immersive animations and experiences.
Liam Houlihan is a sculpture and installation artist whose practice responds to experiences as a student, worker and life within broader economies of labour. His work manifests as speculative "survival kits" and iterative, kinetic sculptures that try (and almost always fail) to resolve feelings of exhaustion, alienation and grief. He is interested in the utopic/dystopic role of machines as surrogates for the human body; machines whose existence contemplates futures where automation replaces human labour, work becomes optional and the tenets of capitalism disintegrate. Liam lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wangal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
Dean is an image-based artist who lives and works in Sydney. His works explore the essence of
reality, memory and history.
Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked
and the commonplace, Dean’s work involves a questioning of reality and memory, as well as a
reinvention of both the modes of appearance and the creation of the history. His work can be
reminiscent of a network with multiple connections and the fragments of an embedded story. It is
ultimately a huge set of hidden clues to be deciphered, encouraging viewers to make their own
associations and invent their own narrative in order to unravel the complexity staged by the artist.
Dean holds a Master of Art degree from the University of New South Wales Art and Design (COFA),
and his works have been exhibited extensively in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and New York,
receiving positive acclaim. Dean’s artistic achievements include awards from the Center for
Contemporary Photography in Melbourne and finalisted in Macquarie Emerging Art Prize, Head On
Photo Festival and Australian Photo Award.
Thomas is an artist exploring the nexus between scientific theory and contemporary culture by combining technology with more traditional art forms such as sculptures and installations. He was recently the runner up for the prestigious Prix Arts Numériques at Académie des beaux-arts in Paris.
After having studied mathematics in Gothenburg, he went on to complete a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Technology in Sydney. He is now a practising artist in Australia and Europe. Thomas has been the recipient of various awards and acknowledgements and his work has been exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), the Eyebeam gallery (New York), the Science Gallery (Melbourne, Dublin), theMuseum (Ontario), FILE (SAo Paulo), Bow Arts (London), SIGGRAPH (Sydney), Konstfack (Stockholm), NordArt (Hamburg) and Experimenta (Australia). He has been attending several international artist's residencies including Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Anna Tow is a digital artist and lecturer at UNSW School of Art and Design, based on Gadigal land, specialising in immersive animation using 3D and sound design and by drawing on her extensive experience as a professional animator since 2002.
Anna’s recent work Motion and Trails (2024) recently exhibited at Chicago's Creativity and Cognition Conference.
Anna collaborates with diverse artists and designers on ambitious projects, creating large multi-screen animations for performance or sound design for intimate installations. Anna explores innovative digital artmaking approaches, serving as both artistic outcome and research documentation for future interdisciplinary practices.
full artist statements
Progress and Excess, 2026
Willow Ferris
3D animation with sound
3 minutes 20 seconds
Progress and Excess is a 3D animation exploring tensions between organic and constructed environments. Seemingly endless numbers of buildings and construction sites are animated to reveal patterns found in nature such as fractals, waves, and branching growth. As these patterns emerge, they signal a conflict between working with and against nature; between the ambition to provide housing that harmonises with the existing community and environment, and the pull of privatised development to produce high-rises that only a select few can afford.
The work positions Sydney’s ever-changing skyline as both subject and material, incorporating real buildings taken from photos in Bankstown. Through procedural modelling, the city is abstracted. Buildings are duplicated and animated, forming into dense, sculptural, living entities with undulating systems. The city expands rapidly and repetitively, but access narrows. By reconceptualising the built environment through computer graphics, Progress in Excess offers new ways of seeing the city around us, its patterns, ambitions, and excesses.
Sound by Linus Ferris
junk_data, 2025
Willow Ferris
3D animation with sound
6 minutes 57 seconds
Junk_data explores the liminal state of the council pickup pile. Digitally scanned, the objects are frozen in their moments between use and disappearance. These piles on the footpath signal both a private rejection and public visibility of the everyday objects that no longer make the cut. In an algorithm-driven world that encourages us to constantly upgrade, follow trends and desire the new, our waste reflects a culture of mass consumption and designed obsolescence. More innocently, it’s also a mundane archive of life.
These piles of ‘junk’ have been translated into point clouds of data through 3D scanning on a mobile app. They are then reassembled in an immaterial, virtual landscape to slowly disintegrate. By presenting waste in transformation, junk_data offers a meditation on the value and impermanence of the physical objects we collect. It also asks, what does disposal look like in the virtual world? Without physicality, digital data is lost so easily. There is no public ritual of the council pickup pile when cleaning out the downloads folder. No neighbours to pass by and pick through the digital junk, perhaps finding a file that they'd like to keep for themself. If the material world is transitory, then the cyber world is even more ephemeral.
Sound by Linus Ferris
Typing Machine, 2026
Liam Houlihan
Kinetic sculpture
60 x 60 x 60 cm, durational
The keyboard’s relentless click clack haunts office buildings, computer labs, and waiting rooms. The click clack is the sound and symbol of work in action – of note-taking, editing, backspacing, navigating, scripting, debugging, drafting, emailing. It transfigures thoughts (abstract, diffuse) into words (concrete, singular).
When a machine performs the act of typing, it imagines another (not so distant) world; a post-human, automated, efficient, robot world, where the soft flesh of our fingers and the synaptic firing of our nervous systems are replaced with a perfect matrix of epoxy circuit boards, geared motors, and colourful ribbons of crimped and soldered wire.
The typing machine speculates two conflicting (but coexisting) futures. In the first future, humans are made obsolete; decommissioned by ever-improving, never-tiring machines. In the second future, humans face the same fate – obsolescence – but they rejoice. They are outside, offline, playing in the sunshine, and (thanks to the machine) freed from the monotony of work.
Bankstown/Cologne (To A. Sander), 2026
Dean Qiulin Li
Single channel video, stereo sound
9 minutes 53 seconds
I like photographic portraits as a way to represent every individual’s identity. At the same time, I don’t see portraiture as a device to document identity but as a means of engaging the performance of identity. It is how people present themselves and respond to being seen, or play with who they are.
Every portrait is a collaboration. I’m interested in that space where control shifts, where intention mixes with instinct, where identity becomes a little more fluid.
I don’t aim to capture the “truth” about someone. I try to stay open to whatever version of themselves they choose to offer or whatever slips through in the moment. The unpredictability and tension between showing and hiding is what interests me.
Armageddon Clocks, 2025
Thomas Marcusson
Repurposed chess clocks, electronics, wood tables, cables, charging station
Dimensions variable
Within each repurposed chess clock, two microchips battle each other by taking turns to process mathematical problems. Once solved, they utilise the analogue button mechanism to indicate completion, handing over the challenge to the opposing chip. The chips continue this back-and-forth until one of them runs out of time, in which case the game simply resets and starts over. This repeating match-up is indicative of how A.I systems such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) train their algorithms - through endless computational challenges between two opposing sides. Similarly, the rapid development of A.I is defined by rivalry; a multitude of private entities are constantly refining their models to gain an edge in a winner-takes-all scenario.
Chess has historically been a benchmark of human vs machine intelligence. Boris Kasparov was famously beaten by IBM’s computer Deep Blue in 1996 after breaking a stalemate, making it the first time a computer beat a world champion. In chess, armageddon is a format designed to break a tie by creating an imbalance on the board. The Armageddon clocks are not subjected to such a disequilibrium, but the world they operate in seems destined to tilt one way or another in the decades to come.
Self-serving System, 2026
Thomas Marcusson
Sculptural installation
Dimensions variable
Self-serving system is a kinetic artwork that uses Victorian servants' bells to explore our relationship to A.I - and A.I’s relationship to itself. Historically, servants' bells were attached to a network of strings which allowed masters to remotely summon their servants to various parts of the household. In Self-serving system, the strings connect one bell to the other bell and through a motorised lever, allowing them to ring and serve each other.
This becomes analogous to the A.I term “closing the loop”, a phenomenon where humans are removed from the decision-making process; thus creating a self-correcting, continuous feedback cycle. LED lights on each bell display the internal activity after it’s been rung, as it processes a computational problem which will decide which bell will be pulled next and for how long, instigated by A.I generated code.
Through our current way of interacting with A.I systems, using curt prompts and commands expecting superhuman results, we presume that the master/servant dynamic will remain upheld. But with human input excluded from the system, we might ask ourselves who’s really in charge as we draw closer to the loop being closed and the advent of general artificial intelligence.
Motions and Trails, 2024
Anna Tow
3D animation with sound
4 minutes 44 seconds
Sculptural forms inspired by sea life, ancient creatures, and abstract structures come alive and transform across a series of cinematic scenes.
Motion and Trails represents the latest stage in an evolving practice that showcases animation's immersive and cinematic potential. Responding to the theme 'Creative Organic Spaces', this animation explores creative possibilities to art making and imagining virtual spaces through 3d animation techniques and digital abstraction.
Premiered at the Creativity and Cognition Conference 2024 Inside/Out Exhibition Chicago.
Screens on loan from Campebelltown Arts Centre
Motion Ghosts, 2026
Anna Tow
3D animation and particle FX
3 minutes
Abstract forms move randomly, emitting particle trails that fade into ghostly traces. This animation references "ghosting" in hand-drawn animation, after faint marks are left when charcoal or soft pencil drawings are erased and redrawn on paper.
Digital particles evoke this analogue process by visualising motion data collected from participants at a drawing workshop held at UNSW's School of Art and Design in December 2025. The data is rendered in virtual 3D space, translating and enhancing physical gestures of drawing into decaying digital traces.
The full Motion Ghosts animation will exhibit at DRAW space Gallery, Enmore Sydney, 2-26 April 2026.
Progress and Excess, 2026
Willow Ferris
3D animation with sound
3 minutes 20 seconds
Progress and Excess is a 3D animation exploring tensions between organic and constructed environments. Seemingly endless numbers of buildings and construction sites are animated to reveal patterns found in nature such as fractals, waves, and branching growth. As these patterns emerge, they signal a conflict between working with and against nature; between the ambition to provide housing that harmonises with the existing community and environment, and the pull of privatised development to produce high-rises that only a select few can afford.
The work positions Sydney’s ever-changing skyline as both subject and material, incorporating real buildings taken from photos in Bankstown. Through procedural modelling, the city is abstracted. Buildings are duplicated and animated, forming into dense, sculptural, living entities with undulating systems. The city expands rapidly and repetitively, but access narrows. By reconceptualising the built environment through computer graphics, Progress in Excess offers new ways of seeing the city around us, its patterns, ambitions, and excesses.
Sound by Linus Ferris
junk_data, 2025
Willow Ferris
3D animation with sound
6 minutes 57 seconds
Junk_data explores the liminal state of the council pickup pile. Digitally scanned, the objects are frozen in their moments between use and disappearance. These piles on the footpath signal both a private rejection and public visibility of the everyday objects that no longer make the cut. In an algorithm-driven world that encourages us to constantly upgrade, follow trends and desire the new, our waste reflects a culture of mass consumption and designed obsolescence. More innocently, it’s also a mundane archive of life.
These piles of ‘junk’ have been translated into point clouds of data through 3D scanning on a mobile app. They are then reassembled in an immaterial, virtual landscape to slowly disintegrate. By presenting waste in transformation, junk_data offers a meditation on the value and impermanence of the physical objects we collect. It also asks, what does disposal look like in the virtual world? Without physicality, digital data is lost so easily. There is no public ritual of the council pickup pile when cleaning out the downloads folder. No neighbours to pass by and pick through the digital junk, perhaps finding a file that they'd like to keep for themself. If the material world is transitory, then the cyber world is even more ephemeral.
Sound by Linus Ferris
Typing Machine, 2026
Liam Houlihan
Kinetic sculpture
60 x 60 x 60 cm, durational
The keyboard’s relentless click clack haunts office buildings, computer labs, and waiting rooms. The click clack is the sound and symbol of work in action – of note-taking, editing, backspacing, navigating, scripting, debugging, drafting, emailing. It transfigures thoughts (abstract, diffuse) into words (concrete, singular).
When a machine performs the act of typing, it imagines another (not so distant) world; a post-human, automated, efficient, robot world, where the soft flesh of our fingers and the synaptic firing of our nervous systems are replaced with a perfect matrix of epoxy circuit boards, geared motors, and colourful ribbons of crimped and soldered wire.
The typing machine speculates two conflicting (but coexisting) futures. In the first future, humans are made obsolete; decommissioned by ever-improving, never-tiring machines. In the second future, humans face the same fate – obsolescence – but they rejoice. They are outside, offline, playing in the sunshine, and (thanks to the machine) freed from the monotony of work.
Bankstown/Cologne (To A. Sander), 2026
Dean Qiulin Li
Single channel video, stereo sound
9 minutes 53 seconds
I like photographic portraits as a way to represent every individual’s identity. At the same time, I don’t see portraiture as a device to document identity but as a means of engaging the performance of identity. It is how people present themselves and respond to being seen, or play with who they are.
Every portrait is a collaboration. I’m interested in that space where control shifts, where intention mixes with instinct, where identity becomes a little more fluid.
I don’t aim to capture the “truth” about someone. I try to stay open to whatever version of themselves they choose to offer or whatever slips through in the moment. The unpredictability and tension between showing and hiding is what interests me.
Armageddon Clocks, 2025
Thomas Marcusson
Repurposed chess clocks, electronics, wood tables, cables, charging station
Dimensions variable
Within each repurposed chess clock, two microchips battle each other by taking turns to process mathematical problems. Once solved, they utilise the analogue button mechanism to indicate completion, handing over the challenge to the opposing chip. The chips continue this back-and-forth until one of them runs out of time, in which case the game simply resets and starts over. This repeating match-up is indicative of how A.I systems such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) train their algorithms - through endless computational challenges between two opposing sides. Similarly, the rapid development of A.I is defined by rivalry; a multitude of private entities are constantly refining their models to gain an edge in a winner-takes-all scenario.
Chess has historically been a benchmark of human vs machine intelligence. Boris Kasparov was famously beaten by IBM’s computer Deep Blue in 1996 after breaking a stalemate, making it the first time a computer beat a world champion. In chess, armageddon is a format designed to break a tie by creating an imbalance on the board. The Armageddon clocks are not subjected to such a disequilibrium, but the world they operate in seems destined to tilt one way or another in the decades to come.
Self-serving System, 2026
Thomas Marcusson
Sculptural installation
Dimensions variable
Self-serving system is a kinetic artwork that uses Victorian servants' bells to explore our relationship to A.I - and A.I’s relationship to itself. Historically, servants' bells were attached to a network of strings which allowed masters to remotely summon their servants to various parts of the household. In Self-serving system, the strings connect one bell to the other bell and through a motorised lever, allowing them to ring and serve each other.
This becomes analogous to the A.I term “closing the loop”, a phenomenon where humans are removed from the decision-making process; thus creating a self-correcting, continuous feedback cycle. LED lights on each bell display the internal activity after it’s been rung, as it processes a computational problem which will decide which bell will be pulled next and for how long, instigated by A.I generated code.
Through our current way of interacting with A.I systems, using curt prompts and commands expecting superhuman results, we presume that the master/servant dynamic will remain upheld. But with human input excluded from the system, we might ask ourselves who’s really in charge as we draw closer to the loop being closed and the advent of general artificial intelligence.
Motions and Trails, 2024
Anna Tow
3D animation with sound
4 minutes 44 seconds
Sculptural forms inspired by sea life, ancient creatures, and abstract structures come alive and transform across a series of cinematic scenes.
Motion and Trails represents the latest stage in an evolving practice that showcases animation's immersive and cinematic potential. Responding to the theme 'Creative Organic Spaces', this animation explores creative possibilities to art making and imagining virtual spaces through 3d animation techniques and digital abstraction.
Premiered at the Creativity and Cognition Conference 2024 Inside/Out Exhibition Chicago.
Screens on loan from Campebelltown Arts Centre
Motion Ghosts, 2026
Anna Tow
3D animation and particle FX
3 minutes
Abstract forms move randomly, emitting particle trails that fade into ghostly traces. This animation references "ghosting" in hand-drawn animation, after faint marks are left when charcoal or soft pencil drawings are erased and redrawn on paper.
Digital particles evoke this analogue process by visualising motion data collected from participants at a drawing workshop held at UNSW's School of Art and Design in December 2025. The data is rendered in virtual 3D space, translating and enhancing physical gestures of drawing into decaying digital traces.
The full Motion Ghosts animation will exhibit at DRAW space Gallery, Enmore Sydney, 2-26 April 2026.