CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
DAY 1
9:00 Conference welcome
Speaker to be announced soon.
Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tūteauru, Ngati Hine, Ngāi Tūpoto) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans film, sculpture, costume and body adornment, text and photography. Since the 1990s she has significantly influenced the development of contemporary art and contemporary Māori art in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her ability to harness and manipulate seductively high production values is often expressed through portraiture where she explores how identity and history are represented, and the intersection of these ideas with concepts of place and community.
Through a pioneering practice combining photography, video and installation, Lisa Reihana employs a philosophy of ‘making’ rather than 'taking’, with a long-standing emphasis on portraiture and historical ancestral narratives. In 2017 she represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the Venice Biennale, with a 24-metre wide video artwork animating early French contacts with the Pacific. Reihana is a Member and a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2018, 2022), New Zealand Arts Laureate for her services to art.
10:15 Morning Tea
Details and panelists to come.
Dr Johnson Witehira (Tamahaki, Ngāi Tuteauru, Ngāti Hāmoa), a leading expert on Māori art and design, has an extensive history of work in and across the GLAM sector. As an artist Johnson has worked with a number of galleries and curators across Aotearoa, with his works being shown in several of New Zealand’s most prestigious spaces.
Johnson is currently a Professor of Toi Hangarau (Creative Technology) at Massey University's Toi Rauwhārangi. As a former director at IDIA, an indigenous design organisation based in Wellington, Johnson has also been engaged on various projects helping Aotearoa’s GLAM sector build better experiences for Māori. Recently IDIA undertook a significant piece of research, alongside ArchivesNZ, into how Te Reo Māori is applied across digital platforms. Working alongside Te Puna Mātauranga Johnson also recently led the development of a unique digital learning resource for kura Kaupapa Māori.
Auckland Museum partnered with the Bioeconomy Science Institute Plant and Food Research Group and creative partner PHQ to design an interactive digital public engagement experience that showcases fruit genes and their abilities to resist climate change and make us healthier.
This experience harnesses the power of digital tools to immerse visitors into a lush orchid, where visitors will engage with exciting fruit genes to create colourful and climate change resistant fruits for the next generation. The innovative fusion of physical and digital creates an environment where visitors can connect with each other on climate resilience, particularly young people who are the target audience for the exhibition.
This experience supports engagement and learning around climate change and genetics, both topics which can be difficult and confronting. Audiences are given the information in an accessible way, whilst seeing on an individual level how fruit genes possess the ability to resist the impacts of climate change. The immersion of this space creates an approachable and inclusive experience for all, presenting a friendly orchid environment which allows families to explore genetics and climate change safely.
Nicholas Yeats is an Interpretive Planner at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum where he leads the content and interpretation of world-class exhibitions. He has worked in the Aotearoa New Zealand museum sector for the last decade, and his experience is grounded in interpretation and audience engagement via exhibitions and education. He comes from a science communication background and has a particular interest in digital experience development and multimedia storytelling.
Picture: weak robots hand built by a Japanese professor; a chorus of hacked Furbies; an obsolete ELIZA chatbot running on an emulated mainframe; discarded service robots hooked up to external AI brains; and dancing in a closed feedback loop with lab grown braincells.
This was FRIEND (Nov 25-May 26), the NCM exhibition exploring how people attach meaning, emotion and memory to technologies—co-creating companions, collaborators and cybernetic extensions of themselves. FRIEND asked what becomes possible when we question how people relate to embodied, intelligent and living machines. It was fundamentally a project about connection: between humans and machines, but also between the people making them.
Bringing together artists, researchers, technologists and technologies from across Australia, Asia and the UK, the project explored how self organisation, care and slowness as method can prompt innovation, new ways of working together, embracing deep collaboration and even failure. In doing so, the project forged new systems with internal and external collaborators, accidentally launching a creative technology studio a year early.
Spanning tech, design, curatorial and the stuff in-between, this talk unpacks the behind-the-scenes of making FRIEND: what worked, what didn’t, what we learned and why that matters for how we build and collaborate together now.
Jemimah Widdicombe leads the development of exhibitions, digital projects and collection acquisitions as Senior Curator at the National Communication Museum (NCM) in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Her work focuses on the intersection of culture and technology, and is underpinned by foundations in human interaction research and design, and cultural production. She is the founding curator of the National Communication Museum, an experimental technology museum opened in 2024 in Melbourne, Australia. Her recent curatorial projects at NCM include Rising Festival 2026, FRIEND and Instruments of Surveillance.
Jesse Stevens is an Artist, Creative Technologist, and Creative Lead of NCM Studio, the in-house technology laboratory of the National Communication Museum (NCM). Jesse brings over 25 years of expertise across a broad spectrum of arts technology bridging virtual and physical space. A passionate advocate for retro-futurism and embodied AI, Jesse builds the worlds he wishes to live in. For two decades, he has been one half of technology art duo Cake Industries with Dean Petersen, producing anthropomorphic and autonomous sculptural works through mechatronics, robotics, and reworked everyday objects. He seeks the ghost in the machine, and pushes for a great big beautiful tomorrow.
12:30 Lunch
This paper describes a major undertaking by the Upper Hutt Libraries Heritage Team to educate and engage its local community about the brief period at the end of the 20th century when Upper Hutt was a major industrial centre. While a physical exhibition within the local library provided a focal point, digital and online technologies played a crucial role in the larger endeavour of which this was part. For instance, social media outreach via Facebook groups was pivotal to uncovering information, locating artefacts, and identifying oral history subjects. The exhibition itself also contained important digital elements, most notably an audio-visual display of short films made using oral history extracts. Visitors selected and listened to these films via an old Telecom pushbutton phone (of the kind once made in Upper Hutt), modified using a raspberry pi mini-computer. Finally, to ensure ongoing impact, the exhibition was subsequently repackaged into various forms of online digital content, using both the Library’s Recollect website and the City Council’s ArcGIS StoryMaps tool. This presentation will discuss problems encountered and lessons learned, and how small local history teams, working on a minimal budget, can have maximum impact through leveraging the power of digital technology.
Katharine Watson is the chair of Christchurch Archaeology Project, a not-for-profit organisation she established with two colleagues to save, share and research Ōtautahi Christchurch’s archaeological heritage. Katharine is passionate about Aotearoa’s rich and varied heritage, and about sharing that heritage with others. Prior to running Christchurch Archaeology Project, she owned and ran an archaeological consultancy. She still does some consultancy work.
Marcos Gabriel Merlo is a game developer and immersive-technology specialist with over 15 years’ experience across games, XR and digital storytelling. He began in the video games industry at Ivolgamus, Nordcurrent and Main Core, contributing to AAA titles for DreamWorks and Activision. In Aotearoa, he was CTO and Lead Game Developer at Conical, leading VR, AR and interactive titles including Green Fairy and other educational experiences. He later worked at Aurecon on advanced visualisation and interactive consultation tools. Trading as One Simple Matter, Marcos leads the development of Mōkihi of Time.
Danny McNeil has worked for the last 14 years in Christchurch City Council Libraries in the innovative technologies and public programming space. Ensuring that Ōtautahi’s diverse communities have equitable access to exciting new technologies, programming and opportunities is his focus. Implementation of public Auahatanga – Creative Spaces has seen Danny involved in everything from 3D Printing and Laser Cutting technologies through to VR, AR and more recently Esports into Public Library offerings. Creative collaboration and partnerships are also key elements of his role of which the Mōkihi of Time Kaupapa is a perfect example.
This illustrated talk will describe the successful implementation of an AI-assisted workflow in AV digital preservation.
AV Preservation staff at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision were recently tasked with preserving a collection of DVD-Video recordings.
At the time we had few established protocols for preservation of DVDs. This issue arose during a project to digitise and preserve a recent nationally significant audiovisual deposit. Resolving this supported our mission to make audiovisual taonga accessible before the original carriers deteriorate beyond rescue.
After reaching consensus on how digital materials derived from DVDs would fit into our established preservation frameworks, the workflow’s design and testing phase hinged on the use of ChatGPT to write a shell script to faithfully extract digital files. Later use of the command-line agent Claude Code extended and formalised both the script and associated GitHub repository. This helped fix many edge-cases and anomalies that arose during the processing of the collection.
Without clear preservation protocols and workflows, audiovisual taonga are at risk. Appropriate collaboration with chatbots and agentic AI in writing code can assist archival institutions where in-house coding experience is limited. This project ensured long-term access to these taonga and established a model for future preservation initiatives.
With a 40-year background in broadcast television, advertising and video editing, Tom Ackroyd came to Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision in 2016 as a born-digital collector. In 2020 he moved to the Preservation Team where he works to digitise and preserve a broad range of magnetic tape and optical disk audiovisual formats. His favourite format is DVCAM.
Tom lives in Matairangi Mount Victoria in Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington, with his wife Viv and their dog Fred. He is a keen choral singer, photographer and film-goer.
Dr Johnson Witehira (Tamahaki, Ngāi Tuteauru, Ngāti Hāmoa), a leading expert on Māori art and design, has an extensive history of work in and across the GLAM sector. As an artist Johnson has worked with a number of galleries and curators across Aotearoa, with his works being shown in several of New Zealand’s most prestigious spaces.
Johnson is currently a Professor of Toi Hangarau (Creative Technology) at Massey University's Toi Rauwhārangi. As a former director at IDIA, an indigenous design organisation based in Wellington, Johnson has also been engaged on various projects helping Aotearoa’s GLAM sector build better experiences for Māori. Recently IDIA undertook a significant piece of research, alongside ArchivesNZ, into how Te Reo Māori is applied across digital platforms. Working alongside Te Puna Mātauranga Johnson also recently led the development of a unique digital learning resource for kura Kaupapa Māori.
14:30 Joint Q&A
Details to follow.
This talk will discuss how some preliminary experimentation with Copilot leads to an investigation of the ways it gets things wrong; in this case Ngā Upoko Tukutuku/Māori Subject Headings. I was attempting to get a suitable summary of a recorded interview, Copilot offered to find appropriate subject headings for the summary. It kept finding new and exciting ways to be incorrect. Eventually I did find a way to make it work - but at the cost of more time than purported use of AI would save! That led to some deeper questions of AI and the usage of Māori data.
This falls under Whakairohia te rākau taumatua \ Crafting collaboration and innovation, specifically disproved use cases. I think this will be interesting to the attendees of NDF due the combination of the appearance of Māori data and AI’s inability to correctly use it, being more inclined to give an answer than be correct. This has implications for how libraries and other institutions use AI, especially when creating records using Māori data, and it would be great to connect to other attendees who are attempting similar use cases.
Nik Crombie (Kahugnunu, Rongomaiwahine, Rakaipaaka) is currently a Digital Research Services Coordinator at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington and has worked in libraries for most of her career. She is co-chair of the Local Contexts Library Working Group. Her professional interests include data sovereignty, indigenous metadata, accessibility and digital preservation.
A statistics-based contemplation of collection sharing efforts from the Kōtuia ngā Kete project.
Collection-sharing website Kōtuia ngā Kete was launched by Te Papa’s National Services Te Paerangi in 2023, with the ambition to provide greater visibility of taonga held by collecting communities in Aotearoa. Two years in, this lightning talk will use some rudimentary data from the site to consider the fluidity of collections access and how we might now define a distributed national collection.
We will touch on some of the barriers to sharing collections, including attracting whare taonga and marae-based collections to participate. We will also consider some of the models which might support digitisation and collection sharing efforts.
All of this might just change our perspective of success.
The paorangi | impact of sharing collections collectively has benefits to communities that care for collections and those communities that they serve. By evaluating our goal of access to communities against the reality of delivering this service,this talk hopes to inspire the NDF community to consider how they can help support access to collections outside their own organisations.
Emma Philpott is the programme lead for collection-sharing site Kōtuia ngā Kete and was the Product Owner for development of the website. She has spent the last decade at Te Papa working across sector support, content development and policy roles. She has previously worked for non-profit, charity and cultural sectors both in NZ and the UK. She is particularly interested in championing good practice and innovative solutions in the museum and gallery sector.
15:30 Afternoon Tea
16:35 Joint Q&A
16:45 Day 1 Closing
17:00 NDF Connect
Abstract to follow.
This talk explores how digital practice is reshaping what it means to be an archive from the perspective of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. It examines how archival institutions respond to changing expectations, technologies and communities, and the choices they make along the way.
From a collecting perspective, we reflect on what we prioritise as an archive and how digital formats challenge traditional approaches to appraisal and stewardship. What does it mean to collect something that is fluid, linked, or constantly evolving?
We will explore the tensions, challenges and opportunities of being a digital archive today, including questions of scale, sustainability, trust and digital equity. Participants from cultural institutions and agencies across Aotearoa New Zealand are likely to be grappling with similar issues as they collect, preserve and provide access to digital content.
Richard Hulse is Chief Digital Officer at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. He has a strong background in broadcasting and digital. More recently, Richard has spent time at Te Papa, as Head of Digital, at GS1, and in private consulting/coaching practice.
As well as having worked as a sound engineer and producer, Richard led RNZ's transition from analogue to digital documentary production. He also established and led RNZ's digital operation and website for 10 years.
Kate Roberts was the project executive for the Utaina mass digitisation project (2021–2025) and is now Strategic Advisor, Archiving at Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision in Wellington, New Zealand. She comes from the museum and library sector, having trained as a conservator in Canberra in the 1980s and worked at Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Library of New Zealand, Archives New Zealand, Auckland City Libraries, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. While in Western Australia, Kate volunteered at the Kimberley Language Resource Centre from 2014 to 2015, writing its digitisation plan for audio recordings and kick-starting her career shift into audiovisual archiving.
DAY 2
9:00 Opening
Ash Mann has spent most of the last couple of decades inside the world of digital in cultural organisations - in-house, as an agency director, and now as an independent consultant. He works with leaders, teams, and organisations across Europe and North America on challenges that usually involve a messy combination of people, strategy, technology, and change.
He spends a lot of time thinking about the conditions that surround digital work and each year he explores a question about what makes digital work, or not. Last year it was failure, this year it’s the invisible labour that nobody budgets for or understands.
He hosts the Digital Works podcast, writes a weekly newsletter, and lives in Göteborg on the west coast of Sweden with his wife and their new baby.
Digital literacy programmes have existed for decades. Yet people and institutions continue to face misinformation, phishing, unsafe data practices, AI misuse, and declining trust in digital environments.
This plenary argues that digital literacy must now move beyond technical skills, confidence, and knowledge alone. In the age of AI, digital literacy brings together Digital Skills, Cybersecurity Awareness, and AI Competency. These domains enable people to use digital systems, protect information and communities, and judge AI-generated outputs, recommendations, and actions.
The presentation introduces Knowledge, Capability, and Reflection as three forms of evidence for understanding digital literacy. Knowledge concerns what people understand. Capability concerns what they can do in authentic digital situations. Reflection concerns how they explain, evaluate, and justify their decisions. This approach shifts assessment from what people say they know toward observable behaviour and responsible judgement.
The plenary also connects digital literacy with digital citizenship. Digital literacy asks whether people can act effectively in digital environments. Digital citizenship asks whether those actions are responsible toward other people, communities, institutions, culture, and society.
For galleries, libraries, archives, museums, iwi organisations, and records institutions, this shift has direct implications for AI-generated metadata, collection access, cybersecurity, cultural authority, provenance, restricted knowledge, community consultation, public trust, and sustainable digital practice.
The session introduces the International Digital Driving License, or IDDL, as an operational framework for assessing Digital Skills, Cybersecurity Awareness, and AI Competency through Knowledge, Capability, and Reflection. A related hands-on workshop will allow participants to explore the IDDL through realistic tasks, behavioural evidence, decision-making activities, and reflective assessment in GLAMMIR contexts.
Ahmad Ghandour is an Adjunct Professor of E-Business and Information Systems with more than twenty years of teaching, research, and academic leadership experience across New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Australia, and the United Kingdom. He completed his PhD at the University of Otago.
His recent work focuses on digital literacy, artificial intelligence competency, cybersecurity awareness, digital transformation, and behaviour-based assessment. He is the creator of the International Digital Driving License, or IDDL, a digital capability framework designed to assess what people know, what they can do, and how they reflect on their decisions in realistic digital environments.
His current work examines how digital capability can support responsible digital participation, institutional trust, and professional practice in the age of AI.