NDF Connect
A networking event to close off Day 1 of NDF25, with a chocolate tasting from Baron Hasselhoff.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? AI, death tech, and handing your visitors over to virtual characters. \ Tom Siddall, Claudia von der Borch
What happens when your metahuman decides to overshare about their existential crisis? Or when one of your AI workers decides to unionise mid-interview? What about a disgruntled virtual character that decides it’s done talking to your visitors?
In MOD.'s 2025 exhibition, FOREVER, we explore speculative “death tech” through Eterna.Life, a fictional company that invites visitors to a near-future careers opportunity. Here, AI-driven characters interview visitors for roles like consciousness uploading specialist or cryogenics technician. These interactions challenge visitors to consider the ethical and personal implications of speculative technologies and living beyond death.
Designing Eterna.Life was an experimental and iterative process. It’s one thing to develop AI characters in theory, but quite another to place them in a dynamic, live gallery space where visitors interact unpredictably. The lack of control was thrilling and confronting, forcing us to embrace failure and adapt as we tested, ensuring the visitor journey remained inclusive, accessible, and thought-provoking.
This talk will cover the risks and rewards of relinquishing control to AI in cultural spaces. MOD. and design studio Junior Major will share how we prototyped and refined this experience, blending humour and ethical complexity into an immersive exhibit. A demo of the AI interviews will showcase how this project redefines cultural engagement with emerging technologies.
This isn’t another talk about AI’s theoretical merits or potential fears - this is about putting AI to work in the real world, live, in an exhibition context, and with all the unpredictability and humour that entails.
Claudia von der Borch is Exhibitions Lead at MOD., a future-focused museum in Adelaide. She drives the development of engaging and innovative exhibitions through impactful design. Exhibitions worked on closely by Claudia have received national and international recognition. Prior to this role, Claudia consulted on heritage and online engagement projects, and engaged in marketing, programming and collection-based roles in the GLAM sector. Claudia is currently Vice-President of the AMaGA SA branch and has recently completed her fellowship as a George Alexander Fellow with the International Specialised Skills Institute investigating immersive exhibition design techniques.
Tom Siddall, Junior Major. Tom has a long history of working with museums, architects, and artists around the world. He has created award-winning experiences in Dubai, Singapore, the US, Europe, and Australia for clients such as Atlassian, Museums Victoria, Museum of Sydney, Australian National Maritime Museum, Dallas Love Field Airport, Conrad Shawcross, Google Creative Lab, and ACMI - projects such as an interactive sporting gallery, a reactive digital flip-dot sculpture, an immersive installation about migratory birds, and an intergalactic online experience. Tom thrives on the challenge of transforming seemingly impossible ideas into reality.
A Different Light: Take your own 19th-century style portrait \ Shaun Higgins, Jessica Morgan
The exhibition A Different Light : First Photographs of Aotearoa unites collections and expertise from three major institutions—Auckland Museum, Hocken Collections in Otago, and Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. This unique collaboration combines significant photographic archives, allowing each partner to contribute unique insights, resources, and historical artifacts that highlight New Zealand’s early photographic history. The exhibition allows original 19th-century photographs to reach diverse audiences by touring across the three venues.
Aligned with the touring nature of the exhibition, A Different Light includes a versatile digital photo interactive to deepen visitor engagement. This experience invites audiences to step into a 19th-century portrait studio where they hold still to capture and customise their own historical-style photograph. Using a touchscreen, visitors can add colours and select frames, all inspired by exhibition daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and prints. The final image can be emailed as a keepsake, merging traditional portraiture with digital customisation. The interactive has been crafted inhouse at Auckland Museum with adaptability in mind, allowing it to seamlessly integrate into each venue.
Shaun Higgins has been working with photograph collections for over two decades, ranging from numerous exhibition contributions to research into unknown photographers. He has a background in Anthropology, Art History and Photography combined with Museum Studies and specialist training in Photographic care and identification. He is currently responsible for management of the pictorial collections of photographs and paintings at Auckland War Memorial Museum including research, collection development, exhibitions and collaboration. Current research interests include early New Zealand photographs, conflict photography, photographic technology and its application including digital, computer vision and photographic identification.
Jessica Morgan is a Digital Experience Producer at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, where she plans and produces engaging and innovative digital experiences for museum audiences. She has a background in development and creative arts and has experience working in both development and production roles within a museum context. This experience has allowed her to develop a strong understanding of developing digital projects from a technical and production perspective and has enabled her to deliver experiences across a range of technologies with a focus on enabling meaningful engagement for Auckland Museum’s diverse audiences.