Meditation on Country - AI and Art

The communication between writer and reader, artist and audience, is the nearest we come to telepathy: to transmitting and receiving information between minds. Turing recognises that his machines will struggle to match this human refinement. (Beard 2025)

Nature is written in mathematical language. (Galileo Galilei)

 Von Neumann's work on self-reproducing automata shows us that, in a universe whose physical laws do not allow for computation, it would be impossible for life to evolve.  (Agüeray Arcas, 2025)

Recently I went to see Data Dreams: Art and AI at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney.  The main reason for my visit was to experience the work of Australian indigenous film-maker Angie Abdilla, in particular her Meditation on Country, an immersive experience generated by combining scientific and cultural datasets through an array of machine-learning (ML) models trained through cultural programming protocols (ANU 2025).

Meditations on Country is a collaborative multi-media project which explores the role of indigenous protocols in Artificial Intelligence and presents the “Creation Story” from the dual perspectives of the Yuwaalaraay nation and Western Astrophysics. It draws on the combined knowledge of Indigenous Elders and collaborators with Astrophysics consultants to present a journey through time and space.

I found the installation extremely moving as it took me into a space beyond time in which the human quest for ‘answers’ is expressed through stories.  

For the Yuwaalaraay the Biame Creation Spirit decides that the spirit people, who have been fighting over resources, need to learn the lesson of the consequences of greed through the experience of physical pain and grief which is resolved through the Acknowledgement of Country as Grandmother Mimi Spirit calls all the different species to come into being.

For ‘Western’ Astrophysics the “Big Bang” starts off a chain reaction where, from a single tiny point, the Universe begins and in one part of it an asteroid carrying hydrogen collides with a planet resulting in what we now call ‘life’.

One of the challenges of Meditations on Country is how to bring these two 'systems of thought' together. To do this Angie and Machine Learning Programmer Kieran Browne chose seven pivotal moments which they presented through different computer models, ranging from John Conway’s Game of Life, to Boids flocking algorithm, deep neural networks, DDSP Neural Networks, Shaders, Large Language Models and Stable Diffusion.

Throughout the work Angie seeks to demonstrate the role of Indigenous Protocols for AI particularly in how the stories were captured and interpreted.

So why did I find this so moving and why do I think this installation is so important?

Throughout history artists have used novel and emerging technologies to tell stories and create experiences and this is precisely what Angie has done as she interrogates the relationship between story and computation. Some parts flow smoothly, others have glitches and mistakes but this is all part of the experience from the Boids with their links to the Uncanny Valley to the lossiness in the images of Australian birds which Angie directly links to the environmental impact of AI systems in their use of natural resources.

For indigenous peoples working to survive in a harsh environment the ability to create, remember and interpret traditional stories told through dance, song, medicine and walking was quite literally a survival manual, not just a performative or discretionary practice.

You don’t dance the dance until you dance it proper

You don’t tell the story until you tell it proper

There was something quite primal about the experience of Meditation on Country which reminded me of the work of Carl Jung and his work considering the psychic influence of the earth and the conditioning of the mind by place, the field of eco-psychology.  

The mythic bonds to Nature such as those found in Aboriginal Australian cultures appear to have real survival value because they bind us to the earth in a meaningful way. When these bonds are destroyed by excessive rationality or a collapse of cultural mythology, we are left alone, outside the community of Nature and in an alienated state. In this state we do real damage to the environment, because it is no longer part of our spiritual body or moral responsibility. (Sacred Jung Psyche Earth)

This seems obvious for indigenous peoples who have so recently been disconnected from their traditional ways of life. For them Caring for Country is something fundamental to their existence.

But what of the many other human beings who now largely live their physical lives in concrete jungles and their social lives mediated via screens and increasingly smart machines?  We know that having a connection to the natural world has mental health benefits and that having an appreciation of the natural environment links to pro-environmental behaviours (see here and here) so how does this link back to Meditations on Country and the messages it seeks to convey?

The first message is the essential importance of the retention of knowledge through stories for human survival.  Many stories are layers of knowledge which are only accessible with the right ways of knowing and cultural practice, and all technologies are cultural.  The more we are relying on our machines with little consideration or thought about what cultural values and norms are embedded in them the more we lose our own ways of knowing in order to be able to access and understand the knowledge we need to survive.

Technology challenges us to assert our human values which means that first of all we have to know what they are (Sherry Turkle)

The second is that as we move further into what many are calling the ‘mother of all disruptions’ what can we take from indigenous wisdom and knowledge to help us make sense of and cope with what is going on around us?

Brian Rommele believes we have 5000 days until the world as we know it changes irrevocably.  He suggests that Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey provides a useful pathway to navigate this changing paradigm and Campbell himself draws on common patterns across oral and written traditions, although these are largely about men.  This brings me back to Jung again because Campbell explicitly grounded his journey on Jung’s Depth Psychology drawing on archetypes and the collective unconscious, albeit largely from the European perspective. This is largely about how to guide individuals in their search for meaning within a broader collective which brings me to a dynamic which I feel that Meditation on Country helps put in perspective.  

The Yuwaalaraay Creation Story embeds knowledge through strict rules and performative cultural techniques.  In modern Astrophysics the Big Bang gives the story of creation from the perspective of Western Science drawing on theories (stories) developed through observation and measurement. Both incorporate the duality of the individual and the collective.  The Creation Story may be seen as a living law and relational cosmology which holds persons, kin and country in balance; the Astrophysics Story is explanatory, and, as with Jung and Campbell, is part of the narrative that Western culture has developed to explain the world around us.

They each have much to offer but the power of bringing them together, of seeing how the technology may struggle with parts of the stories and present something that is messy and imperfect, speaks to what is so very precious about 'life'.

Our lives are precious precisely because they are not perfect, nor do they fit perfectly into any computer model.

As Carl Sagan put it in The Pale Blue Dot:

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Biame created life on Earth to teach the spirits a lesson. It would seem that we are still learning that lesson, regardless of where we come from and who we are. Our technologies are extensions of ourselves and our collective unconscious. They link us to each other and to the lands upon which we live. If we use them wisely we may well be able to

This is a true Meditation on Country.