About

Photo: Keelan O'Hehir

150 word bio

Sean Dockray is an artist, writer, and programmer based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Monash University (MADA). His work, rooted in architecture and media theory, explores how data and computation shape contemporary life. In 2020, he co-founded Machine Listening with Joel Stern and James Parker, focusing on the political and aesthetic aspects of sound in the age of AI and big data. The collective’s projects span diverse media, including artworks, an expanded curriculum, online resources, curated events, and compositional tools. Dockray’s previous collaborative platforms, The Public School and AAAARG.ORG, examined the possibilities of self-organised pedagogy, forming the basis of his theoretical and practical approach. From 2004 to 2014, he was Curatorial Director of Los Angeles-based Telic Arts Exchange, curating exhibitions and experimental projects and providing critical engagement with new media and culture.

Bio

Sean Dockray is an artist, writer, and programmer based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Monash University (MADA). His work, rooted in architecture and media theory, is concerned with the politics of technology, exploring how data and computation shape contemporary life. His practice operates across research, writing, software development, and collaborative platforms, often manifesting as long-term frameworks that host and generate other projects, communities, and forms of inquiry.

Dockray's quasi-institutions include Machine Listening Curriculum (co-founded with James Parker and Joel Stern in 2020), a critical platform for research and artistic experimentation focused on AI-based listening; knowledge-sharing platforms The Public School and AAAARG.ORG; and the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, where he served as a founding director. His studies take diverse forms—from installations and lecture performances to essays, software projects, and neural networks—each pursuing distinct lines of investigation through sustained engagement with particular technologies, concepts, or phenomena.

Recent exhibitions and presentations include Data Relations at ACCA, Melbourne (2022); House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm at HKMV, Dortmund (2022); and performances such as "Hack Piece" and "Listening to the Diagnostic Ear." His written work appears in publications including Artlink, Frieze, Cabinet, and Volume, addressing topics from artificial intelligence and online education to infrastructure and automation.

His practice-led PhD at the University of Melbourne, Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident developed an expanded notion of the essay form to explore how artists might stage encounters with algorithmic systems.

Contact

You can find contact information here: https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/sean-dockray

About this website

This website is an ongoing exercise in self-documentation. It is a static site built with mkdocs, which is typically used to document software projects.

• The mkdocs config is kept in one repository: https://github.com/sdockray/mkdocs-spd
• The website content is kept in another: https://github.com/sdockray/website-spd

An action builds the website on every content push.