Martin Disley is a creative technologist and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work develops out of a practice of counterfoil research into advanced technologies, with a current focus on machine vision technology.

Martin has received commissions from Extinction Rebellion, Shetland Arts, The Indeterminacy Research Group at the University of Dundee and the Centre for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, amongst others.

His work has been exhibited at the V&A Museum (Dundee, Scotland), NEoN Festival (Dundee, Scotland), Summerhall (Edinburgh, Scotland), The Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, Scotland), Guterhallen Gallery (Soligen, Germany), Sala Aranyo (Barcelona, Spain) and Kunstencentrum Vooruit (Ghent, Belgium).

Prompted by the difficulty GLAM institutions face exhibiting vast digitised collections in the attention economy, Martin’s Resident Entrepreneur Project focussed on producing digital image and video assets for institutions which synthesise the contents of their digitised collections using generative machine learning technology. For the duration of his project, Martin was also the National Library of Scotland’s artist-in-residence, where he worked closely with the library’s map collection. He curated bespoke datasets of tens of thousands of images and, using state of the art machine learning technology, created representational models of some of the library’s digitised collections. Using these models he was then able to produce the media for exhibition.

During his Resident Entrepreneur project, Martin developed a suite of creative machine-learning tools that can tease out hidden value in underutilised archives.

His RE project, Mapping Mechanical Imaginary,  was nominated for the John Byrne Award in 2020.

Martin participated in our New Modalities of Experience session at the 2021 CI Innovation Showcase.