Eryk Salvaggio

Eryk Salvaggio is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work, which is centered in creative misuse and the right to refuse, critiques the mythologies and ideologies of tech design that ignore the gaps between datasets and the world they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, policy researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level.

Eryk has worked with partners including AIxDesign’s Story & Code program, the AI Village at DEFCON 31, Space10, the Australian National University, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, and the National Gallery of Australia. His work has been published in academic journals such as Leonardo, Communications of the ACM, IMAGE, and Patterns, as well as Tech Policy Press. His artwork has been presented at SXSW, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the White House-backed AI Village at the hacker convention DEFCON 31, the New Museum, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the DAHJ Gallery. He has been highlighted in pieces with Wired, the BBC4, The New York Times, ArtForum, NBC News, Neural, Dirty, Mute Magazine, and Outland.

His work has been exhibited at Michigan State University Science Museum, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Eyebeam, CalArts, Brown University, Turbulence, The Internet Archive, and in books including Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais’ At the Edge of Art, Alex Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Peter Langford’s Image & Imagination. He has presented talks, keynotes and works at the Systems Research & Design Conference (RSD10, 11, & 12), the Advances in Systems Sciences and Systems Practice Conference (2022), Melbourne Design Week (2021), MIT Press (2021), the University of St. Gallen (2018), California College of the Arts (2018, 2019, 2020), the University of Maine, RightsCon (2020), and Gensler San Francisco (2017). As a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Brown University, he created the article on Algorithmic Bias in 2016.

Eryk has taught at the Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, RIT, and Bradley Universities, and has given talks or lectures at ANU, NYU, the University of Cambridge, Aarhus, the University of Copenhagen, UC Fresno, and Northeastern University. He holds a Masters in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University. He earned two concurrent undergraduate degrees, in New Media and Journalism, from the University of Maine, where he was listed as visiting faculty as an undergraduate based on his early interactive, online net.art work.