Machine Learning
- mikestubbsart
- Nov 15
- 2 min read
Mike Stubbs in collaboration with Roland Denning (2025, 15")
Machine Learning starts with a single object: the 1873 Boulton and Watt rotative steam engine, now standing quietly in the Powerhouse Museum. Developed during Mike Stubbs’ research scholarship and made with filmmaker Roland Denning, the film mixes video, archive fragments and sound by Jennifer Joanne Rozenfelds, with voices from Nathan Mudyi Sentence, Deborah Lawler Dormer, Matthew Connell and Chris Muller.
The engine is shown not as a neutral invention, but as a machine that accelerated a whole way of organising land and people. Its steady, unrelenting cycle became a model for how labour would be timed and managed—a rhythm imposed on workers and, more broadly, on Country itself. With increased speed came increased control. Colonial land-use practices hardened, and the long-established systems of First Nations stewardship were pushed aside by the logics of industry and “progress.” The engine didn’t just move things forward; it reset the coordinates.
Stubbs draws a parallel—loose but revealing—to contemporary machine learning. The connection isn’t about technical lineage, but about intention. The desire to regulate, predict, optimise. What was once governed by brass and iron is now handled by code and data, but the underlying push is similar: to streamline the world into something measurable, controllable, and profitable. These new systems continue to shape social life with a scale and distance the original engine only hinted at.
Through layered sound and testimony, Machine Learning looks at the machinery behind the machinery: the structures of power that decide what moves, who benefits, and what gets erased. The film asks what it would take to step outside that frame—to acknowledge First Nations knowledge as something more than a footnote, and to imagine forms of learning grounded in relationship, responsibility and the land itself.
Supported by the Australian Government through the ARC Linkage Scheme: Curating Museum Collections for Climate Change Mitigation, with commissioning led by the Powerhouse Museum in partnership with Western Sydney University, Swinburne University of Technology and Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. Produced by Metamedia for Powerhouse.
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