This performance takes place as part of the exhibition launch of Care in the Code.
What would it mean to get under the skin of a chatbot?
Large Language Models work via many hidden processes of prediction. However, via clean interfaces, these complex operations are reduced to simple ‘chatbots’ that often promise effortless, objective, and universal knowledge production.
In this live, interactive performance, exhibiting artist Chloe McFadden invites audiences to explore and disrupt the predictions of Large Language Models. Using tarot cards and chalk, participants will uncover and reflect upon the hidden and tangled nature of predictive knowledge as their collective future is embedded and read by a chatbot. By sharing space and contributing together, we will build our own web of relations and predictions, treating this as an inherently social, political, and worldly act.
Through this, audiences are invited to consider the authority and trust placed in chatbots, and to imagine what might happen if we pause and dwell within the messiness of how knowledge is produced.
Note: This performance can accommodate a maximum of 11 participants. We strongly recommend registering your participation so we can accommodate any accessibility requirements.
When
Thursday 16 October, 6.45-7.15pm
Where
Cost
Free
Care in the Code is a brand-new exhibition that sits at the intersection of art and technology and explores the creative potential of coding as a tool of care and community engagement. Responding to rising anxieties around the impact of AI technology on the way we work, play and live, the exhibition offers a snapshot of current artistic approaches to the use of code, focusing its lens on expanded notions of care as a counterpoint to the traditional emotional detachment of machines.
From digitally augmented dance and hair-combing robots to large language models that offer tarot readings, visitors will encounter digital technologies encoded with human expressions of care, intimacy and familiarity. This selection of works reflects the central role of the human hand in coding and a refusal to cede control to the algorithm.
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.