Dr Josh Harle is a multidisciplinary researcher and new media artist with a background in Computer Science, Philosophy, and Fine Arts. His practice investigates diverse forms of ‘sense-making’, technology as cultural practice, and the expressive potential of repurposing digital capture tools through hacking, experimentation, and play.

Harle’s doctoral thesis formed part of an Australia Research Council linkage grant with the Emergency Information Coordination Unit, developing approaches to spatial representation in crisis contexts. This included collaboration with CSIRO’s WASP team and the use of game engines as tools in the investigation of existing and speculative architecture, for which he received the 2011 Young CAADRIA (Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia) Award.

Harle has exhibited locally and internationally, including for Vienna Art Week, Organhaus, Chongqing, and Today Art Museum, Beijing, and locally for solo and group shows at Firstdraft, Verge Gallery, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, AGNSW’s Contempo program, and Brisbane Powerhouse’s ‘IRL: Digital Festival’. He has written for the Journal of Artistic Research, the Runway Journal for Australian Experimental Art, and Das Superpaper and presented at the National Experimental Art Forum, Perth, Transmediale, Berlin, the National Institute of Experimental Art Conference, and Spaces of History / Histories of Space conference UC Berkeley.

In 2015, Harle was Australia Council ECAP resident artist with UWA’s Centre for Rock Art Research and Management and the iVEC Advanced Visualisation Lab, working with rangers at Murujuga national park, Pilbara to explore the development of culturally appropriate digital reconstructions of Indigenous rock art sites. In 2016 Harle was a MuseumsQuartier, Vienna resident artist and research fellow, hosted through the Research Institute for Arts and Technology. He is a co-editor of an open-access collection of essays entitlee ‘Decolonising the Digital’, showcasing examples of culturally diverse digital media practices in Australia.

Harle is the director of Tactical Space Lab, founded with the goals of ‘demystifying’ virtual reality as an art-making tool, and generating new, artist-informed digital practices and critical insight. Since 2017 the lab has hosted an experimental transmedia studio working collaboratively with non-digital artists to explore these technologies, and used the outcomes as showcases for hands-on skill workshops. Studios resulted in inclusion in Ars Electronica and ISEA programs, and the 2019 and 2020 Mordant/ACMI commissions, with Joan Ross, and Tully Arnot.