Antony Nevin

Antony Nevin

Senior lecturer, Ngā Pae Māhutonga Wellington School of Design

Antony’s creative practice aims to harness the creative potential of design empowering science and science empowering design. The focus in his creative practice is in crossing boundaries between science and design. He does this through collaborative, transdisciplinary projects focused on biomedicine, artificial intelligence, and the ethics of science. Antony is passionate about the role that a scientifically well-educated and curious population can play in addressing 21st Century challenges.

Antony received a New Zealand Government Curious Minds award in 2020 and was Artist in Residence at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona in 2019. He has exhibited installations and run workshops focused on the intersection of design and science both nationally and internationally.

Antony co-directs the Visual Communication Design programme in the School of Design. He coordinates the honours level research and development course, teaches core VCD courses and interdisciplinary courses that focus on designing unique experiences for festivals and events, such as CubaDupa. Antony developed and coordinates the design thinking course for Massey’s School of Health.

  • Expertise

    Creative arts and science, design and science, artificial intelligence, creative technology, practice-based research, human-centred design, transdisciplinary, immersive, and interactive installations

  • Recent research successes

    The Uncanny Valley of Breath (2022)
    The Uncanny Valley of Breath is an immersive installation commissioned for the BIAS exhibition at Science Gallery, Dublin that shows the innate biases in Artificial Intelligence (AI) through exposing the subtle boundaries in human speech. While, for humans, breath is our most intimate connection to life, for an AI it is a marker of an inefficient system. An AI can only perceive breathing as an interruption of data. Because of this, it is inherently biased to never understand the subtleties that make us human.  The Uncanny Valley of Breath was shown at Science Gallery, Dublin from October 2021- Feb 2022 before being permanently installed at Ireland’s research Centre for AI-Driven Digital Content Technology, ADAPT.

    MBIE Curious Minds Award: BIOLUMEN LAB (2020)
    Antony received a New Zealand Government Curious Minds award in 2020 to develop BIOLUMEN LAB, an immersive, experiential discovery environment which  combines science with creative technology, art, and design to introduce concepts behind DNA and allow people to discover ways in which genetics and our environments play a part in shaping who they are.

    Artist In Residence: Institute for Research in Biomedicine (2019)
    Antony was the 2019 Artist In Residence at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Barcelona, Spain. At the IRB he collaborated with leading biomedical scientists exploring data derived from stem cell organoids, yeast cultures and the structure of proteins.

  • Qualifications

    • MA Animation and Interactive media (RMIT University)

    • PG Dip Animation and Interactive media (RMIT University)

    • Cert IV in Workplace Training (Swinburne University of Technology)

    • PG Dip Teaching (Christchurch Teachers College)

    • Diploma Fine Arts (Otago Polytechnic)

  • Professional affiliations or service roles

    Creative Capital Arts Trust - Advisor