Dr Ben Swift
ANU School of Cybernetics
ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics
Dr Ben Swift is a Senior Lecturer at the ANU School of Cybernetics.
Ben is an internationally-recognised interdisciplinary scholar and electronic/computer music artist, and an expert in computational art and music, artificial intelligence/machine learning, cybernetics, data vis/data science and user experience (UX) design. A unifying thread is the potential of liveness (human-in-the-loop interactivity with real-time feedback) in tools and workflows, especially in open-ended creative tasks.
He is the founder and director of the code/creativity/culture (c/c/c) studio, an interdisciplinary research and teaching collective that specialises in making things that explore the way code (software), creativity (especially the arts) and culture (life) intersect in the modern world.
As a livecoding artist Ben has performed at international arts festivals, including the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC). He’s the Vice President of the Australasian Computer Music Association (ACMA).
Ben is a maker of open-source software tools for music, creative code, data analysis/visualisation, and more. He’s one half of the core development team for the Extempore programming environment GitHub stars, the state-of-the-art in livecoding languages. Extempore’s users are a worldwide community of programmers, artists, musicians, and data visualisation practitioners. He has more than 10 years’ experience as an OSS community manager, technical writer, software engineer and creative code outreach ambassador.