Work

Past opportunities

  • Women and Non-Binary Gamers Club host (2022 and 2023)
  • From July to November in 2022, I was ACMI's Women and Non-Binary Gamers Club host, taking over the role temporarily in lieu of the previous host, Jini Maxwell, going on to focus on their role as Assistant Curator at ACMI. I have continued to host the WNBGC since May 2023.
  • Express Media's Toolkits Connect - Digital Storytelling (2022)
  • This program was led by writer, editor and digital media extraordinaire Rory Green. Over 12 weeks, we learned together about digital expressions of writing, were given guidance and shared our works-in-progress. At the end of the program, we produced a final project: a digital zine featuring the finished products. You can also find the other people involved via our webring. Rory helped us build a personal website too, so I learnt some HTML and CSS while I made this one.
  • On Gaming and Social Change panel discussion for the Yarra Ranges Regional Gallery (2022)
  • This was done in celebration of the opening of ACMI's traveling exhibition, "Code Breakers: Women in Games", at the Yarra Ranges Regional Gallery. I spoke with Lisy Kane, Larissa Hjorth and Caitlin Cronin, and together we talked about the more positive impacts of videogames, something which often evokes the disparaging term, "screen time".
  • AAANZ Conference (2021)
  • Friend and colleague Michelle Guo organised a panel called the "Impact of the Digital". Together, we co-presented a paper on the ways in which virtual exhibitions fail and could learn from videogames. You can read a transcript of our paper here.
  • GamesHub's Wordplay Mentorship program (2021)
  • Assistant Curator at ACMI Jini Maxwell mentored me through the process of writing a piece for GamesHub, conducting interviews and writing a pitch. As a result, I wrote God, give me a body: How virtual events and museums can be better.
  • MASS MeMo: A MeMo Review Mentorship (2020)
  • I was mentored by Victoria Perin: PhD student, writer, and regular contributor to MeMo Review. I wrote about home as a locus of contestation in the works of the department of Photography that year at VCA.

Writing

  • 2023
  • The Wiggly Worlds of Relax ‘em Ups – can videogames connect us with nature? was written in tandem with ACMI's exhibition 'Marshmallow Laser Feast: Works of Nature'. Focusing on "relax 'em ups" - non-violent, meditative games like Proteus, Everything and Ian MacLarty's Red Desert Render - I reflect on my experiences of their digitally-rendered scenes of nature.
  • 2022
  • My time with the Toolkits: Digital Storytelling program resulted in a final project titled: A short wander through the (recent) history of visibility. This was my first (but hopefully not last) foray into using Twine to present a non-fiction essay. Here, I looked at the ways in which visibility + vision have expanded in a matter of centuries – and then, in a matter of decades – by drawing on Charles Darwin, photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the Event Horizon Telescope, Jordan Peele's NOPE and artist Andreas Gursky.
    HYPER//ECHO : a traveller's diary is a multi-week project commissioned in tandem with Firepit Collective's virtual exhibition, which ran for 3 months. As the digital work grew and decayed, I would record my observations roughly every two weeks. I draw on a broad range of topics: the problem of preserving the internet, New Media Art, dérive and the Situationist International, the sublime, Hyperart Thomassons, and so on. I also played around with the material where I could, publishing one essay as a little gamelittle game and another as a HYPER//ECHO retrospective in the form of a Padlet.
    Paper-Feel and Digital Play is a commission from Rory Green, Cordite's Games Literature Editor, who approached me after having seen this game/mini essaygame/mini essay I had made as a part of the "traveller's diary" for ACMI. This was a collaboration: I wrote the essay and pitched a few ideas for how it would look in the digital format, while Rory supplied the coding to make it all happen. I reference videogames like Her Story, Elden Ring, Colestia's A Hand With Many Fingers, Porpentine's With Those We Love Alive and The Nonary Game: Virtue's Last Reward, as well as Jorge Luis Borges's Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.
    Occupy White Walls is democratising art with video games is a feature for GamesHub which examined Occupy White Walls, a somewhat schlocky videogame which nonetheless managed to capture something of the experience of seeing an art exhibition in the virtual format. This acted as a kind of follow-up to an earlier GamesHub article I had written the year earlier called "God, give me a body".
    I wrote Digital Intimacies and Echoes in Space for ArtsHub, covering Roslyn Orlando's EKHO exhibition at Blindside, Larissa Hjorth's work and the HBO show The Rehearsal.
    I've also written copy for ACMI's Women and Non-Binary Gamers Club as host for the club for the games we played from July - December.
  • 2021
  • God, give me a body: How virtual events and museums can be better was the final product of my time with the Wordplay mentorship program. I interviewed Lecturer in the School of Communication, and a Chief Investigator in the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT Brendan Keogh, as well as artist and gamemaker Cécile Richard on their work in creating virtual events. I compare their work, which has been informed by videogames, to virtual exhibitions by major art institutions like the National Gallery in London and find these exhibitions lacking in an understanding of the videogame embodiment which Richard's and Keogh's work has fully realised.
    I wrote Melbourne Queer Games Festival, The Glitch, and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Perceived for my application to GamesHub's first Wordplay mentorship program. The editors liked it so much they decided to publish it. Drawing on theory from Hito Steyerl's In Defense of the Poor Image and Legacy Russel's Glitch Feminism, I argued that these works explore queer identity through this aesthetic of "pixel soup" because the Glitch communicates a desire to be understood outside binary perceptions of gender.
  • 2020
  • Photography, Victorian College of the Arts was a 500-ish word reflection on pieces which evoked home: comfortably familiar, precarious, and threateningly isolatory. It was written for the MeMo Review menotrship.
Toolkits Digital Storytelling Webring