David Pledger is an award-winning conceptual, media and performance artist and futurist operating at the intersection of art, technology and science as a maker, curator, writer, and producer.

From his initial practice, live performance, he developed an inter-disciplinary dramaturgy, engaging artists across artforms and experts from social, scientific, and academic fields. His future-focussed, ideas-led practice is notable for engaging publics in productive and provocative ways.

He has created interactive media, immersive theatre, site-specific festivals, installations, documentary and discursive events for broadcasters, theatres, galleries, arts centres, museums and public sites in art and film festivals, visual arts and performance programs in Australia, Europe, and Asia.

He publishes writings across multiple platforms about his practice interests that include emerging technologies, the body, the politics of power, the public realm, the climate emergency. He is founding Artistic Director of not yet it’s difficult (NYID), one of Australia’s leading experimental arts outfits.

He is currently Cybernetics Imagination Resident, ANU School of Cybernetics.

Tell us about your experience with ANAT SPECTRA. 

I was the curator of Multiplicity the inaugural Triennial program of ANAT SPECTRA. This year will be Reciprocity which I think is a wonderful thematic progression. From multiplicity to reciprocity, there’s real beauty in that evolution. 

Even though there’d been previous iterations, it was clear from the get-go that ANAT wanted and was committed to a new and distinctive adventure. So, we developed a platform from the ground up: concept, program architecture, hybrid delivery, shared vision, a curatorium to feed in and bounce off ideas. I was very committed to a First Nations-centred program which, given post-event feedback, I think we successfully delivered.

I loved creating SPECTRA Vision with the team; it provided lots of space for play and humour and meant we had a fun mechanism for engaging a world that was in the final throes of the pandemic, with all the attendant stress and anxiety. It also meant we could reach an audience that couldn’t come in-person to Science Gallery Melbourne, so it invited in people who lived remotely, people who lived with a disability, parameters which today should be a crucial part of any public event.

“The ideas lead the artmaking and if I don’t have the skills, I try to persuade people to work with me or teach me.”

What or who inspires you in the realm of interdisciplinary practice, and why?

I’m a bit wary of the term ‘interdisciplinary practice’ even though I use it myself. Artists might be involved in interdisciplinary projects but it doesn’t always follow that their practice is interdisciplinary. For me an interdisciplinary practice is borne out of not seeing or acknowledging boundaries between artforms. The ideas lead the artmaking and if I don’t have the skills, I try to persuade people to work with me or teach me. In this way, I think of myself more as a conceptual artist. I come up with an idea, put it in the public domain and then work out if I can realise it. I don’t let my lack of knowledge or skill get in the way, ha! 

As for inspiration, well, so many artists. Today’s short list: Khaled Sabsabi, what elegance in the face of such cultural criminality. David Lynch and William Kentridge, both genuinely idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary artists. Marina Abramovic for her provocations and persistence. Octavia Butler, because her alchemy of words and ideas scare the hell out of me. Alexis Wright, because her brain is way bigger than mine, Pina Bausch for her creation, dance-theatre, Nick Cave for his awesome physical and vocal presence, Liam Young, whose work sits smack bang in the middle of our world. And I’m finding videogames to be a very liberating genre to work in.

Name a cultural work that inspired/challenged your creative perspective and tell us why.

Today, I’m listening to cloudbusting by Kate Bush. It’s on high rotation. It’s a beautiful work. It tells the story from a young girl’s POV of a scientist, her father, who works out how to make rain, and then he’s suddenly taken away by powerful men because they perceive him as a threat. It’s such a metaphor for today, the rain represents art and ideas, the men in power are the government or corporations. I love it most because of this one line – ‘I just know that something good is going to happen’. It’s at odds with the deep pessimism of our time. I’m listening to the song as I write this. Usually, I play it to my son who is non-verbal. I do all the choreography, conducting the strings, half-remembering the lyrics, he is so attentive and when he blazes his beautiful smile at me, I really do feel like something good is going to happen. Today it’s my inspiration. It challenges me to work hard, be rigorous, make better.

“I’ve had no interest in a career, I’ve only ever wanted to build a working life as an artist on my own terms.”

If you could collaborate with any figure from history/contemporary culture, who would it be and why?

This is a hard question because collaboration is central to my practice, it’s not simply a way of working but of amplifying my practice, to learn and improve as an artist. The decision to embark on a new collaboration depends on so many interleaving factors – most importantly, timing. Going back some years, I started a correspondence with Robert Wilson, the director-designer. He’d create messages in the form of doodles and send them via fax. He was very charming. I invited him to collaborate on a project that had some seed funding from Adelaide Festival. As I got to know him a bit, it was clear it wasn’t going to work out. I’d just come out of working with Japanese theatre director Suzuki Tadashi as an actor and I felt the relationship would be a continuation of that deshi/student mode. Robert was a big star, and an incredible artist but it just didn’t feel right. He did suggest my company not yet it’s difficult for a collaboration with David Bowie on a performance project. Again, I wondered whether it was the right thing at that time for the kind of practice I was determined to develop because I had a specific plan for my work. Had I taken up that invitation I know I wouldn’t’ve made the works I now feel are important. I’ve had no interest in a career, I’ve only ever wanted to build a working life as an artist on my own terms. To make work that is meaningful and significant. I don’t regret the decision, but I am curious about what might have materialised.

Today, I think I’d benefit by a collaboration with artists whom I am not aligned with artistically, politically, philosophically. That would test me.

What’s next? Tell us about your next project, collaboration or thinking.

Before Multiplicity, I was working with The Things We Did Next, a future-focused collaborative practice with Alex Kelly and Sophia Marinos. It’s in hiatus this year for a variety of reasons, but we’ve just launched a new website with the incredible Nick Vernall at Epic Digital who also did the website for Multiplicity. 

Today, a primary focus is Tomorrow’s Pasts with Tony Briggs (a member of the Spectra curatorium with Robert Walton, Zena Cumpston, Alex Kelly). Tony and I have been friends since the late 20th C. We’ve collaborated on various projects over the years mainly as director and actor, but we decided to create a new practice which revolves around an alternate history of this country in which a race-based civil war is a defining event. It’s a transmedia project – videogame, digital art, television, theatre. It’s very stimulating because all the forms intersect, interact, and inform the others, it’s a process that continually leads to discovering new ways of making inside a big idea. 

I’ve also started a new block of work on 2025 AD, the digital human I’m creating to administer not yet it’s difficult. The first stage concentrated on ‘personalising’ a character; it was as much a performative project as a technology project drawing on Stanislavsky’s personalisation technique. This next stage is about building a dataset. I’m working with software developer, Duyen Ho, who used to be our company administrator in the 2010s before heading off to have a career in tech. She knows our work and my ways of operating so that’s a massive asset.

As for what am I thinking about? Today, I’m thinking about AI, and how technology is moving so fast that media artworks can often be reduced to containers demonstrating technology which is the wrong way round. I’m thinking about censorship in the arts and how that is a serious threat to our democracy. I’m thinking about how what’s going on in America presents an opportunity for Australia to define itself on its own terms. I’m thinking about the climate emergency and how old tropes of guilt and shame are being replaced by new tropes of hope and resistance. I’m thinking about how the power and persistence of First Nations people around the world is an instruction for us all. 

I’m writing a couple of books. More to come.