Mitchell Whitelaw

mtchl@post.lurk.org

Hello 👋 I do stuff like data visualisation, digital cultures, complexity, collaboration, biodiversity, more than human worlds, designing our way out of this mess… Professor of Design, ANU. <a href="http://mtchl.net" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">http://mtchl.net</a>

Posts

Post #1946978
Re-upping Zach Lieberman&#39;s new Atlas of Blobs (via @golan). Worth your time: https://atlasofblobs.cc/ It&#39;s totally delightful to see Zach&#39;s ultra &quot;retinal&quot; work narrated, because he&#39;s mostly quite reticent. For me the most exciting thing about generative systems is their ability to create and visualise *other* worlds: things, relations, ways of being. These texts show this exactly - the poetry of blob worlds reveals and opens up (blobby) ways...
Post #1688767
Bit of #macro in the autumn light up on Mt Majura. This handsome hopper is a Common Macrotona #insects
Post #1159029
New paper! &quot;The Sound of Water: sensing a wetland intervention through interactive environmental audio&quot; just out in cultural geographies: reflecting on making an audiovisual environmental data-story. A joy to work with collaborators Skye Wassens and Adrian Mackenzie on this. This article will be part of a &quot;Digital Ecologies&quot; special issue coming soon 👀 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14744740231197813 #ecoacoustics #dataviz #scrollytelling...
Post #1102878
New work out! Mosaic uses images, sound, video and data to build a portrait of a western NSW wetland. It&#39;s an experiment in environmental data-storytelling and using #conservationtech for public engagement. With waterbirds galore, feral critters and livestock, it&#39;s also an attempt to show the complexity of our &quot;patchy&quot; landscapes. Made for Flow-MER and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office: https://media.flow-mer.org.au/mosaic/ #wetlands #dataviz #w...
Post #712386
Cobeo uses design methods, new conceptual frameworks, workshop settings and reflective practice to support #collaboration. A project led by my friend and colleague Maya Haviland, after years of development it’s starting to go public. Working on this with Maya and Sejul Malde has been a rewarding collab in itself. https://cobeo.net https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/this-game-inspired-innovation-is-empowering-collaboration-across-australia
Post #705365
TIL George Shiras invented the camera trap in the 1890s, using tripwires, remote shutter releases and a magnesium flash. Astounding shots from around Whitefish Lake, a Michigan wetland, all documented in his book: https://archive.org/details/HuntingWildLifeWithCameraAndFlashlight.Volume121935Copy/ #cameratrap #conservationtech #wildlifephotography
Post #642184
LLMs are engines for “more of the same” - they homogenise language and ideas: culturally hazardous. This paper shows massive similarities across responses from 25 models https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22954 A great video outline: https://youtu.be/0PB09fsydZE?si=S0XwcRhBJleyEdpC #ai #hivemind #llm