Ben Swift

Senior Lecturer

Picture of Ben Swift

Location
Birch Building 35

Email
ben.swift@anu.edu.au

Phone
+61 2 6125 7027

Clusters
Computing Foundations

Website
https://benswift.me

Interests

Ben is an internationally-recognised interdisciplinary scholar and electronic/computer music artist, and currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing. He’s an expert in computational art & music, data vis/data science, human-computer interaction, AI/machine learning, and user experience (UX) design.

Research

Ben is the founder and director of the code/creativity/culture (c/c/c) studio, an interdisciplinary research and teaching collective which specialises in making things which explore the way that code (software), creativity (especially the arts) and culture (life) intersect in the modern world.

As a livecoding artist Ben has performed at international arts festivals, including the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC). He’s the Vice President of the Australasian Computer Music Association (ACMA).

For a full list of research outputs, see his website.

Biography

Ben first got interested in computer science through making music, and it was a real “lightbulb moment” to see how machines made of bits and logic could be instruments of real creativity in the right hands. It’s always been this way—artists don’t lag behind the cutting edge of technology, they understand it and push it forward because that’s how you make something new.

Ben has an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science from the ANU. He is currently a Senior Educational Experiences Designer at the ANU School of Cybernetics. For more information, see Ben’s website.

Activities & Awards

Ben is a maker of open-source software tools for music, creative code, data analysis/visualisation, and more.He’s one half of the core development team for the Extempore programming environment GitHub stars, the state-of-the-art in livecoding languages. Extempore’s users are a worldwide community of programmers, artists, musicians, and data visualisation practitioners. He has more than 10 years experience as an OSS community manager, technical writer, software engineer and creative code outreach ambassador.

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The Australian National University acknowledges, celebrates and pays our respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work, and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

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