Luke Burton (artist)

Luke Burton is an Australian multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, composer, writer and creative technologist based in Bondi, New South Wales.

He works under the umbrella entity The Lost Futures, through which he releases music, film and artworks concerned with late-stage modernity, cultural memory, cyber-culture and the persistence of the past.

He draws heavily on the writing of cultural theorist Mark Fisher and on the creative philosophies of Devo, TISM and the Church of the SubGenius.

Burton has worked with generative image systems since 2020, and in 2022 was among the first cohort of artists invited by OpenAI to test DALL·E 2.

His work in Generative AI won him the 2026 AARON award for best synthography, with a ‘cyberdelic’ campaign for fashion brand Crocs.

He has supported TISM frontman Damien Cowell, aka Humphrey B. Flaubert, across multiple projects, including The Arseless Chaps with comedian Tony Martin. The Lost Futures will support TISM at The Enmore Theatre, October 31st.

Burton adopted his current name in August 2024, reclaiming his middle name and his grandfather's surname. He had previously worked as Jesse Chard, and earlier as Jesse Perez; sources published before 2024 refer to him under those names.

Background

Burton's earliest recorded work is the eponymous 1996 EP Divinity, made with a band from his teenage years. As a teenager he was trained in music production by Rick Brewster of The Angels. He began performing publicly in 2001 with The Chaos Technicians, followed by The Strange and Pop Vulture. From 2001 to 2006 he was one of the writers for Stileproject, covering counterculture, hyper-capitalism and cybernetics.

He studied at SAE and Metro Screen, and works across audio post-production, composition, sound design and documentary filmmaking. From 2010 to 2017 he produced travel documentary films for World Nomads, and in 2019 was a cinematographer on the feature Mr. Jimmy, which premiered at SXSW. Burton has described a near-fatal incident while filming in Tokyo in 2016 as formative to his artistic framework.

Radio journalism

Burton worked in radio early in his career, making radio documentaries and winning several ACRA awards. From 2007 to 2010 he was a journalist and producer at Sydney station 2GB.

In April 2019, then working as Jesse Perez, he was one of several former 2GB staff who spoke to the ABC's 7.30 about the conduct of broadcaster Ray Hadley, in a report following allegations made publicly by Hadley's former panel operator Chris Bowen.[2] Burton described being summoned to Hadley's studio over a satirical article he had written in 2009, and said he reported the incident to management without result.[2] Hadley said he could not remember some of the alleged incidents and would need further detail to respond, and 2GB said it had received no formal complaint.[2]

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald days later, broadcaster Tim Brunero publicly supported Burton's account, saying he had witnessed him being called into Hadley's studio and had asked him afterwards to write down what happened.[3]

The Lost Futures

The Lost Futures was founded in 2020 and took shape through the pandemic as Burton began reading Fisher, especially the book Ghosts Of My Life, which makes specific reference to lost futures as a concept. It is framed as an entity in its own right rather than a personal alias.

Burton holds an archive of close to 900 unreleased tracks - the equivalent of forty to fifty albums - spanning three decades and reaching back to his earliest sessions with Brewster. Part of the reason for the development of The Lost Futures was to act as a vehicle to publish and distribute works from this archive, in tandem with the development of new material.

Burton performed under the project's own name for the first time in June 2024 at Vivid Sydney with Jack Shit, and changed his name two months later.

The Vidiot

The Vidiot, conceived in late 2019, was one of the project's earliest expressions: a persona Burton has characterised as a demented version of MTV, developed through the pandemic lockdown.[1] Early live broadcasts were repeatedly taken down mid-show by YouTube and Facebook, pushing him toward a shorter curatorial format, Vidiocracy, which collated video art from experimental creators worldwide alongside archival broadcast material.[1] He played his first public show as The Vidiot in Sydney in 2021 and delivered around fifty live shows and installations before the persona was folded into The Lost Futures.[1]

Televisual Memory

The Televisual Memory of Our Lost Futures debuted in Sydney on 31 May 2023: a hybrid cross-media performance pairing documentary film in the manner of Adam Curtis with an original Vangelis-style score played live.[1] Its visuals were partly built from DALL·E 2 output, with hundreds of individually generated frames spliced into dense video loops, and representing one of the first uses of Generative AI in film.

Live performance

The Lost Futures performs as a two-piece with Sydney vocalist and synthesist Annais Paris, using drum machines, sequencers, samplers and loop hardware including the Korg Wavestate, Roland MC-707, ASM Hydrasynth and Korg Mono/Poly. Its self-coined genre is futronic punk, alongside new-wave, hypnagogic synthpop, hauntology, vaporwave and ambient.

Burton cites influences including Devo, TISM, Prince, The Dead Kennedys, The Future Sound Of London, Orbital, Talking Heads, John Maus, Ariel Pink, Peter Gabriel and Aphex Twin.

Recordings

The Lost Futures debuted with the Futronics EP in 2021, followed in 2025 by the LP Found Pasts Vol. 1 and the EP Dreams In Polyphony, then a run of singles through 2026. In 2026 Burton also issued Divinity, retroactively absorbing the 1996 recording into the catalogue. Three further releases are slated for 2026, Business School [Term One][LP], Please Wear Your Safety Googles For The Incoming Nuclear Attack [LP}, and Simulation [EP]

Generative AI work

Burton began working with the first generative AI image tools in 2020. In 2022 he was brought in as one of OpenAI's first artist testers for DALL·E 2, giving him access to the model before its public release and before generative imagery existed as a commercial industry.

Out of that period came The Cyberdelic Escape from the Self Replicating Goblin Cossacks, a series of large-format plates built with DALL·E 2's outpainting tool and finished as dye-sublimation prints on ChromaLuxe aluminium.[1] Burton describes the work as "cyberdelic", drawing on kybernetikos — to steer — and framing image generation as navigation rather than retrieval.[1] The outpainting tool it depended on was retired in May 2025, and the series cannot be reproduced with current systems.

Commercially, Burton works as a director with campaign clients including Crocs, Lenovo, Cadbury, AMD and Uber; the Crocs campaign received the 2026 AARON Award for Best Synthography.

References

1. Sharma, Manu. "A chat with 'The Vidiot': Jesse Chard discusses his televisual arts practice." STIRworld, 11 September 2023. https://www.stirworld.com/see-features-a-chat-with-the-vidiot-jesse-chard-discusses-his-televisual-arts-practice

2. Park, Andy. "2GB radio broadcaster Ray Hadley faces fresh bullying allegations." ABC News / 7.30, 3 April 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-03/ray-hadley-faces-fresh-bullying-allegations/10958154

3. Brunero, Tim. "The radio station built on bullying." The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 April 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-radio-station-built-on-bullying-20190408-p51c6f.html