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Staying, Making, Connecting: The 2025 creative playbook

In this podcast you will learn how media artists stay with uncertainty, make deliberate choices with technology, and build work through collaboration — with people, place, ecology and time.

This is a 2025 compilation episode, bringing together the advice I ask for at the end of every conversation on Creating new spaces. Across the year, artists returned to a few shared concerns: how to keep going when meaning arrives slowly, how to test and refine work without being led by the tools, and how installation practice is shaped by teams, trust and the systems around us.

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

how to stay with the work when it’s unclear, slow, or shifting
how to make with machines through testing, revision, and refinement
how media work becomes shared — through collaboration, community, and ecology

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Guests featured

Johan F Karlsson, Ariana Gerstein, Monteith Mccollum, Matt Warren, Rita Eperjesi, Georgie Friedman, Matthew Ragan, Troy Merritt, Darryl Rogers, Alex Moss, Maggie Jeffries, and Keith Armstrong

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro: staying, making, connecting
(00:00:00) Intro: staying, making, connecting
(00:00:54) Staying with the work: pace, patience, resilience (Johan, Ariana, Matt, Rita)
(00:05:28) Making with machines: testing, tools, refinement (Georgie Friedman, Matthew, Troy
(00:09:09) Making with others: teams, shared practice, impact (Darryl Rogers, Alex and Maggie, Keith)
(00:13:50) Closing

Projects and organisations mentioned

Edited transcript of this interview

Staying with the work when meaning arrives slowly

Robin: The first theme is staying with the work. This is about the inner conditions that let the work keep moving, even when things are hard, and even when things change. Monteith McCollum describes how site and conditions can shape a work and make it more alive. Matt Warren reminds us that the meaning of pieces can arrive late — and that it can keep changing over time.

Robin: And Rita Eperjesi, when she talks about coding, brings us back to resilience: how to work with problems without taking them personally.

Residencies, place and creative pace

Johan: The advice I’d give is to try to find a residency that sparks your curiosity — maybe in a place and culture you’re interested in, or curious about. Also, look for places that have a theme that’s a bit outside your comfort zone. Architecture was like that for me. You can be surprised by what new ideas bring into your work, and how they broaden your practice. (Johan F Karlsson)

Johan: As long as you’re curious and open towards the world and the people around you, you can go far with your art.

Johan: And don’t feel pressured to produce constantly. I believe very much that you are your art — you’re not necessarily a producer or a manufacturer. You decide your pace, and how far you want to pursue an idea.

Monteith: We’ve learned — I mean, we work differently — but one of the things we like about this, and this is why I like working in performance too, is that we have a certain control. When a film is done, it’s presented in a festival or a theatre, and then you don’t have that control.

Monteith: So you have to learn to roll with the wild card of things happening. It can be fun, as long as you don’t let it stress you out. Unexpected things are going to happen. Be prepared to have a plan B, a plan C, a plan D — and adapt.

Monteith: That’s kind of what it’s about. It’s not fixed — it’s spontaneous. Things are going to happen, and you have to be willing to be up for that experience. But you also have to know the place a little bit.

Monteith: One of the things we were worried about with Currents was that it wasn’t an alley. We’d had this experience in an alley with two large brick walls on either side. At Currents, we had one building on one side, and then an open area with utility poles on the other side, and then the train tracks. It read very differently. Both installations were at a similar height, almost similar distances, but the experience was so different because it wasn’t an enclosed space.

Matt: Follow that path. Immerse yourself in whatever you’re interested in, because it will feed into your process of making, and it will feed into your conceptual framework.

Matt: And don’t worry if it doesn’t quite make sense to you — it will. What the work means might come to you straight away. It might come after you’ve finished the work. It might come to you 20 years later. And the meaning of the work might change as well, based on your sensitivities — and how you change over your life.

Resilience in creative coding and community support

Rita: What I learned from a friend — I think it’s very good advice — is to have faith. Most of the time these things are very intimidating. Creative coding is about not knowing something, then searching how to do something — and many times problems occur.

Rita: If you take these problems personally, you will have a very hard time, as I did. And what my friend said was: if you have faith that these error messages have a reason, and you take the time — and have the dedication — to learn what the reason is, then you can get there.

Rita: But if you think it’s some bigger power trying to stop you from making your artwork, it’s easy to lose your patience and stop.

Rita: Having a community is always very useful too — to not feel alone with your problem.

Making with machines through testing and refinement

Robin: In this part, we move into working with technology as material: testing, improvising, and learning what tools can do — and what they can’t do. It’s about shaping the work with the technology, and not letting the technology take over.

Robin: Georgie Friedman talks about testing and reframes failure as part of the method. Troy speaks about refinement: seeing more with less, until the technology starts to disappear.

Georgie: I’d say: test, test, test. Revise, revise, revise.

Georgie: I was working with a student who was coming up with questions to do a speed Q&A with professors, to get to know them better. One student suggested: “Tell us about a time you failed.” And I thought, that’s a great question.

Georgie: But when I tried to think what I’d say, I realised there are tons of times things didn’t work. You have a great idea — nope, it doesn’t work. Another idea — nope. But I don’t see them as failures. It’s just part of the process of getting where you’re going: you keep testing until you get something that works.

Georgie: The greatest piece of advice I could offer is that there’s no one “right” tool that’s going to solve the problem for you, or find your way into making work.

Matthew: I used to tell people: pick a framework — Max, TouchDesigner, Unity, Unreal — whatever it is — and learn how that environment thinks about the kind of work you want to do. (Matthew Ragan)

Matthew: Then pick a scripting language that’s compatible with that environment, because you’ll need to write some code. Then pick a shader language. If you understand those tools, it becomes less about “how do I make the thing work?” and more about “how do I express a particular idea or concept?”

Matthew: Cultivating curiosity about what you want to express is the most interesting thing you can keep feeding. Tools you can learn. And remember: those tools are constructions — ideas — that help you meet your expressive interests.

Troy: For me, as Soma Lumia has evolved and we’ve made more works, a lot of my role has been about reducing the technological risk of our projects. (Troy Merritt)

Troy: The further we go, the more refined the role of technology becomes — to the point where we’re trying to do more things with less technology. We’re getting better at saying more by using less of it.

Troy: Even in a work like Lacunae — where there’s no escaping that there’s a lot of technology — we’ve continued to evolve the work to make better use of that technology, and almost downplay how important it is.

Troy: It might sound strange, but it feels like a more human work the more refinement it has. So always question, when you’re bringing technology into a work, what it’s actually adding — and how you can find the most refined version of that along the journey.

Collaboration, teams and ecology of practice

Robin: Media work — like what we talk about on the Creating New Spaces podcast — doesn’t happen alone. It’s made in teams who trust each other, and who can work together to solve problems. Sometimes the collaboration isn’t just with people — it’s also with the systems around us.

Robin: Darryl Rogers talks about team spirit, and how people can help carry the technical risks with you. Alex Moss and Maggie Jeffries describe collaboration as its own practice — like a third thing that sits between them. And finally, Keith Armstrong offers a frame for collaboration with nature.

Darryl: If I know Troy — and some of the hair-pulling that goes on — it’s always: be very careful about how you move forward.

Darryl: I loved working with Troy and James because they know their stuff so well in terms of technology. It’s about having a great team around you — team spirit — a team process where you work together and solve problems together.

Darryl: So if it’s a group of people, be open and willing to explore, and trust each other in what you’re trying to do.

Alex: It really comes down to intrinsic motivation. We really wanted to make this happen, so we did it anyway. Work with what you’ve got, and make it happen anyway. If you really love it and want to do it, it will start to grow itself.

Maggie: I spend a lot of time — because of our work at Second Echo Ensemble, and other collaborations — thinking about artist collaboration: what that meeting in the middle feels like, and what it means to be working with another artist and finding a third shared practice.

Maggie: You can experiment on your own, and that can take as long as you like. But if you’re doing it with another artist, you have to be motivated enough to create the spaces where that can happen. Otherwise, it just won’t happen.

Alex: We’re always looking for ways, in this collaboration, to be less noticeable — how can it be more subtle, more integrated, more blended?

Maggie: I don’t want it to end up being one of my paintings that then has projections. It needs to be something else. It needs a different quality of mark making — expression, abstraction — because the source material I’m working with is projections from Alex’s design.

Maggie: So it needs to be a totally different thing. For me to push it in the direction of my own style wouldn’t feel right for this particular project. That’s exciting too, because I get the freedom to work in a style I actually have no idea how to do.

Maggie: I know how to use paint — but not in that way — so I’m learning a new painting style in this collaboration.

Keith: In a way, it might recap some of those great questions you’ve asked, Robin. I think we should be students of past practices — environmental and land art, and all forms of media art that have worked for many years with nature and the ecology of the environment. We should learn from their mistakes.

Keith: These days, I’m more interested in work that does something, rather than says something. In my previous project, Carbon Dating Me, we worked with native grasslands to bring attention to them as an endangered ecosystem — and we got people to grow grass as part of that process.

Keith: In this case, we’re growing forests. The artwork fundamentally does something that has ongoing impact. Out of that, other forms that are acceptable to the art world can be found.

Keith: Try to avoid extractive behaviour. Try not to mimic the things being done to ecosystems in this country and globally. Try to model a solution — because maybe out of it will come a model that inspires people in other parts of society to rethink their relationship, to re-situate ourselves as partners within the system — not lords or masters over it.

Referenced: The Weather at Midnight (project page) and Moonah Arts Centre event listing (Moonah Arts Centre).

Posted 03-01-2026