Ben Swift

Ben Swift is an internationally-recognised interdisciplinary scholar and electronic/computer music artist, and currently the Educational Experiences team lead (Senior Lecturer) in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University—Australia’s top-ranked university (#31 QS world ranking 2021). He’s an expert in computational art & music, AI/machine learning, cybernetics, data vis/data science and user experience (UX) design.

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).

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 for musical livecoding. 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.