Rob Graham

I started collecting records in 1991 and DJing in 1994, and that never really stopped. Through the 2000s I was promoting events, making video work, curating AV nights and putting myself through art school, first a Diploma at Swinburne, then a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master at RMIT.

I came into museums at the front line. Visitor services and exhibition technician at ACMI, which meant standing in the gallery when things broke and learning what the work actually asks of the people running it. From there: collections and digital media at Museums Victoria, then large scale projection with Grande Experiences, which took me to New York, Illinois and Sao Paulo.

In 2022 I took on the National Communication Museum. It was a gutted telephone exchange with dirt floors when I arrived, and four years later it was an operating museum. I hired the technical team that runs it now.

Alongside all of it I have run Counterculture, which is where the record collecting ended up: a weekly show on Kiss FM, a site I built, and a festival. I still think the two halves feed each other. Knowing how a room full of people responds to sound and image is not a different skill from designing a gallery.

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From Waking Up the Museum: An AI Manifesto for Ethical, Community-Driven Digital Culture, Rob Graham, 2026. This page is an implementation of them, not just a description.

1. AI must never invent cultural knowledge. If the record does not support a claim, the system must say so.
2. Every answer should be traceable to visible, auditable sources.
3. Curators remain responsible for institutional knowledge. AI amplifies curatorial work, it does not replace curatorial judgement.
4. Communities should be able to speak back. A living archive welcomes memories, corrections, names and local knowledge through a reviewed pathway.
5. Conversation is part of the archive. Visitor questions and interpretive gaps may become future cultural evidence.
6. Unknowns are valuable. A system that admits what it does not know is more trustworthy than one that fills silence with invention. Every gap is an invitation.
7. The archive should grow without becoming extractive. Contribution must be consent-based, reviewable, removable and attributed with care.