Care in the Code
Exhibition runs Tuesday 7 October – Saturday 8 November
Care in the Code is an innovative interdisciplinary exhibition that centres code as both medium and tool for socially-engaged contemporary art. It shines a spotlight on code and computation, presenting the creative potential of code beyond its traditional problem-solving functions. It uncovers the role artists can play in co-opting coding for the purposes of care and community engagement.
The fascination with technology in the creative field has a significant history, with code-based artistic practices developing as early as the 1960s. Care in the Code builds on this rich background by responding to expressions of contemporary concerns. It offers a snapshot of current artistic approaches to the use of code in the context of physical and emotional wellbeing. The exhibition considers how care – in all its forms and definitions – can be infused into coded behaviours. This selection of works reflects on the central role that humans play in coding, a contrast to subjects of control by a super digital intelligence.
Featured artists: Chloe McFadden, Zoe Qijing Li, Wendy Yu
Curators: Rachael Kiang & Dr. Deborah Turnbull Tillman
Creative Producer: Jessica Montecinos
Supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW with in-kind equipment support from Creative Robotics Lab and UNSW.
Chloe McFadden is an Australian artist and PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales School of Art & Design, working and making on Gadigal land. Her current research engages how artists can disrupt the magical and technical rhetoric and aesthetics used to frame generative AI applications. In her practice, she uses tarot reading to critically approach the predictive logics, processes and experiences of ‘AI’.
Chloe’s work is responsive to the aesthetics, sites, discourses and protocols of algorithmic systems as they appear in contemporary techno-culture. Often process-led and research-driven, her projects unfold across a range of media, from live participatory performances and interactive installations to video works and digital images. She also regularly publishes written reflections as a way of communicating the methods, outcomes and conceptual frameworks underpinning her practice-based research.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Music of The Sails at the Sydney Opera House (2023–24), Practices of Prediction at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (2025), Drawspace Gallery (2024), AD Space (2025, 2023), Prop Gallery Ashfield (2022), UNSW Galleries A&D Annual (2021), and the Hornsby Remagine Art Prize (2019).
Recent and upcoming projects include her long paper What Does it Mean to /IMAGINE with GenAI? at ISEA Seoul (2025), her selection for Umbra Chromatica at The Wrong Biennale’s Digital Pavilion (2025–28), and her recent workshops and talks, such as Disrupting AI Images at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (2024) and her contribution to the Creative Technologies Research Lab seminar on synthetic images at UNSW (2025).
Chloe graduated with First Class Honours and the University Medal from UNSW in 2021. She is currently a casual tutor at UNSW and works across various research labs and projects as a research assistant.
Zoe Li is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in robotic arts and interactive installations. She investigates the abstract roles of human beings in a technological world, exploring the position of “self” within a system, which might be its cultural and historical heritage, a virtual space, or the physical world.
She is currently a PhD student in Computational Media and Arts at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). She exhibited her project in venues such as Shenzhen Art Museum, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Latitude Gallery, NYC, xCoAx 2021, 2022 Beijing Biennial, Macao International Art Biennale 2023, TEI 2024, Siggraph Art Gallery 2024, C&C 2024 etc.
Wendy Yu is a choreographer, designer and creative technologist whose work bridges dance, digital experiences and participatory art. Based on Cammeraygal Country in Sydney, she grounds her practice in place and community. Her work centres on making the language of movement accessible to diverse audiences through innovative uses of technology and community engagement. She draws on her extensive experience in audiovisual design for theatre, large-scale projection art for public festivals, and immersive exhibitions for storytelling. Her innovative methodology integrates real dancers with projection mapping, motion capture and real-time processing for large-scale installations and public artworks in Australia, China, Europe and the USA.
Driven by a commitment to accessibility and transformative placemaking, Yu’s work invites audiences to experience dance as a complex system that fosters new ways of understanding pattern, expression and strength in movement.