Soft Centre's 'SUPERMODEL': Humanity in the time of AI

For the 'average Australian', Australia may not appear to be a particularly welcoming place for experimentation.

So much of what makes Australia what it is, at least to those who live here, is the traditional, conservative approach to valuing art and its politics.

When you’re arguing over which one truly is ‘the nanny state’, can you be blamed?

In reality, experimentation has never been a bigger part of the way we live our lives. If my screen time is anything to go by, I spend almost a third of my day awake staring at a screen, and I’m only talking about my phone. The internet can be, and has become, an incredibly boring place unless you know what you’re looking for. When you do, there’s never been more on offer.

SOFT CENTRE, as described by its founders, is an all too self aware take on the idea of being ‘hardcore’. A soft, gooey centre, to be found at the middle of the art, music and politics that we’re exposed to day in, day out, whether on or offline.

“The origin of SOFT CENTRE was a joke that came about when thinking about the antonym of ‘hardcore’. At the time we were infatuated with gabber and hard deconstructed club music, but we were coming from very DIY community spaces, like the warehouse scene in Sydney post-lockout. So, it was very important for us that there was like a sort of soft gooey centre to it all. Even if the music is extreme, it should feel like a really safe and welcoming space,” SOFT CENTRE’s Thorsten Hertog (he/him) explained.

The ‘festival’, a label which was disputed by its founders in the following conversation, saw its inception at Casula Powerhouse in the Darug Nation in 2017. It emerged from the lesser used warehouses of Eora’s post-lockout law period, primed and ready to provide something whether its city liked it or not.

From Casula to Carrigeworks, collaborations with Amsterdam’s Fiber Festival, Svbkvlt and All Club in China and our own Dark MOFO, and now its first foray into Naarm.

Across music, performance and discussion, SUPERMODEL, and SOFT CENTRE, are committing even more deeply to the human experience that connects us more than ever before. The media we consume, the technology we communicate on, these are all small and incredibly important playgrounds for the works that SUPERMODEL brings to the table.

These artists come from a world that feels more out of sync and yet more connected than ever before. Firas Shehadeh for example, a Palestinian filmmaker, has created a ‘machinima’ within Grand Theft Auto. ‘Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another — Rehearsal’, sees Firas using one of the best selling video games of all time, to investigate life under violent colonial rule.

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salllvage (Rowan Savage) is a proud Kombumerri man, working with AI tools to create voices of crows and other animals using his own voice. “Returning to a very human place, and finding a connection with Country via the non-human world,” Thorsten mused.

DeForrest Brown Jr, an Alabama-raised ‘rhythmanalyst’, writer, and representative of the ‘Make Techno Black Again’ campaign, is not only presenting an extended discussion of his new book ‘Assembling a Black Counter Culture’, but a new live set as ‘Speaker Music’, exploring “black music genres, ranging from cosmic jazz to techno, trap and the Drexciyan mythology.”

Mackenzie Wark, originally a Newcastle-born author, celebrates the 20th year anniversary of ‘A Hacker Manifesto’, and presents a keynote titled ‘Critical (Auto) Theory’, which muses on the history of the literary Autofiction genre to “examine fictions of selfhood”.

Female Wizard collaborates with Harrison Hall, Sam McGilp and Henry Lai-Pyne, in a live cinema experiment, blending harsh noise, exhaustive physicality and real-time endoscope cameras going down people’s throats.

Plenty, plenty more.

SUPERMODEL is the culmination of around 22 months of intensive work by the SOFT CENTRE team, commissioned and presented by Now or Never. It’s the organisation’s first event of this scale, involving not only artistic works, but a series of workshops and ‘discourse program spanning screenings, keynotes and panels’, designed to promote discussion among its punters about the themes it hopes to explore.

Before SUPERMODEL started to truly pick up steam however, as it approaches its curtain call on August 29-31 as part of Now or Never, it would be forced to undertake a series of massive changes in completely moving venues.

Only over a month ago, SUPERMODEL’s original venue and the space in which the team had done all of its work, State Library Victoria, cracked down on staff wearing ‘political items’ and ‘postponed’ a ‘teen writing bootcamp’ allegedly due to the involvement of pro-Palestinian writers.

Fully embedded in a culture that prides itself on its political roots, SOFT CENTRE and SUPERMODEL, after consultation with their artists, made the decision to move venues. With such little time between this decision and SUPERMODEL’s date, the move is clearly done with a focus on the ideals of the community from which they were born.

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This change of venue, aside from being an incredible whirlwind of change for Jemma, Thorsten and their teammates, ended up being a kind of poetic extension of what SUPERMODEL set out to discuss.

“SUPERMODEL is a bit of a tongue in cheek word because it's very evocative. Like initially it brings to mind, you know, these impossible angel bodies walking down runways. But also, for me, it brings to mind this hyper object, or like an AI singularity moment. Something severe and mega and beyond comprehension,” Thorsten described.

The idea of the ‘model’ within technology, the most perfect model, or means of displaying or replicating data, stories and experiences, was set to be explored intensely throughout the many rooms, halls and staircases of Victoria’s State Library. The move to Carlton’s Trade’s Hall however, was all too poignant a plot twist in this story.

In a time where information, media and news is being manipulated by human hands as often as artificial ones, a move to Trades Hall, a historic site for affirmative action, community and protest, has raised many questions not only for SUPERMODEL’s running, but in its meaning.

“Who decides what is included and what is occluded from a dataset or archive? What are the inherent biases? How do we develop our worldviews out of these systems??” Thorsten posed.

“A lot of the program is kind of oppositional to public archives,” he continued. “We're really interested in counter histories and ‘anarchives’ and how we can hack and modify archives to create new alternate histories.”

More deep & involving discussions around technology have, on a global scale, become increasingly funnelled into conversations around AI. Time with technology for work, play and everything in between has people moving away from social media networks like Facebook in droves. ‘The dead internet theory’ is slowly convincing us that the internet has never been in worse shape.

SUPERMODEL proves however, that the internet is not all what we see via mainstream means.

“Our program is really trying to show other avenues and possibilities of moving away from that because there are some really beautiful and interesting and important initiatives that exist off this traditional grid,” she explained passionately.

Thorsten added, “we still continue to debate this because in some ways the internet makes you feel really lonely. In some ways it fosters community, and we've seen amazing collective action born out of the internet and out of all the shit that's happened this year.

With SUPERMODEL we're really interested in how these emergent technologies can be harnessed towards a new commons; a lot of the program deals with collaborative world building tools and co-authorship models like fan fiction. I guess SUPERMODEL in our mind is also a collective term. The model, the dataset, the archive, while fraught, are collections and collections in the sense of the word that it is an assemblage of many different ideas and stories and people and perspectives.”

If you thought this sounded intimidating, confronting, or some other third thing, you wouldn’t be wrong. For SOFT CENTRE, and SUPERMODEL, that’s entirely the point, though they hope it doesn’t turn you away.

“The last thing that I or anyone in the Soft Centre team would want is for us to become this really chin-strokey event that is isolating to the wider community,” Jemma said.

Thorsten added, “I'm sure it's intimidating to some degree. It's esoteric, it's experimental, it's extreme, but I really hope people feel comfortable at our events.

Even despite all this dense shit we're talking about, there is still humour in the program.”

Soft Centre is very ready to honour the perception of them as futurists, but throughout our conversation it became clear that the lens they place on technology and the ways in which we interact with it, is a critical one.

“I think that’s the point of art. To intervene and make evident, you know, the glitch, the problems, the politics and the really exciting affordances of things like AI,” Thorsten said.

With a growing number of successful, critically acclaimed and internationally recognised events under their belt, Soft Centre look to SUPERMODEL, and the return to Eora in 2025, at a brand new location, with an element of bated breath.

Though the appetite for the lesser heard, seen and experienced has earned them the opportunities that they have, Jemma and Thorsten appeared all too aware that an appetite for the experimental requires a broader exposure to it.

“We're always trying to challenge the traditional format of a festival. That’s offered us an opportunity to evolve and shape shift but it's also been really challenging because that's not necessarily the most sustainable way of working,” Jemma explained.

“You can reinvent the wheel and move to a different space, but it’s the harsh reality of throwing a festival and running an art organisation in Australia, where things are so fragile. We’ve been so ready to move on from different spaces, but it’s also out of necessity, and because we feel inspired to expand and work in different contexts.”

With that in mind, the two were also quick not to label themselves a ‘festival’ in the traditional sense. While a fair share of punters have arrived at a Soft Centre event, no doubt quite surprised not to find the hard, industrial techno or hyperpop that the flyer may have had them believe they were in for, Soft Centre has always been about providing something outside of what is available.

“We're always trying to challenge the traditional format of a festival and have been fortunate to work in many remarkable spaces. This has allowed us to continuously evolve and shape shift, but it's also been really challenging because that's not necessarily the most sustainable way of working,” Jemma explained.

“You can reinvent the wheel and move to a different space, but it’s the harsh reality of throwing a festival and running an art organisation in Australia, where things are so fragile. We’ve been so ready to move on from different spaces, but it’s also out of necessity, and because we feel inspired to expand and work in different contexts.”

Though the stresses of the world can be all too strong a deterrent from experiencing and appreciating art in whatever form it may take, SUPERMODEL is set to act as a reminder for the need to challenge ourselves and step outside of our comfort zone

Whether charting venue hurdles or the heavily political ideas and schools of thoughts being pushed throughout their programming, SOFT CENTRE’s SUPERMODEL is set to be, in every sense, the group’s biggest, most ambitious and most rewarding undertaking to date.

But, how are we meant to prepare for something like that?

“Maybe that’s what we really want the outcome to be on Sunday, after three days of programming, for everyone to just hold hands and go touch grass.”

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SUPERMODEL runs from next Thursday, August 29 till Saturday, August 31 at the Victorian Trades Hall. Tickets are available from Soft Centre's website.

Jack Colquhoun is the Managing Editor of Mixmag ANZ, find him on Instagram.