Shelter in Place was born from the speculative question ‘how might we use creative thinking to design personal protective equipment for wildlife to assist them in surviving bushfire?’ Beginning with a range of conceptual designs for wildlife PPE to survive the Pyrocene, it resulted in a large interactive artwork and interactive floor for children, two satellite crafting spaces, and a craft wall display, that asked children to create their own wildlife bushfire PPE designs and ‘care craft’ making-with designs of fire shelters set up on a table. Shelter in Place focused on allowing children to think more deeply about the lives and experiences of other animals and discover their own care-full designs in reaction to this.

It was important to me to also use this as an opportunity for rethinking the notion of 'PPE' and how it is physically made, by suggesting that the best solutions can come from nature itself. As such, the 'face masks' that ended up appearing on the animal's faces were made from plants and animals, rather than human-made and constructed items.

Technologically, the work revolves around six interactive floor spaces where people can stand. A dot on the floor gives simple instructions as to how to engage differently with each interactive spot in order to produce a corresponding face mask element on-screen. For example, kids might stand in one spot and 'squawk like a bird to summon the power of parrots', which makes the parrot face mask appear. By standing across several spaces, children can remix the masks by using multiple asset types - face mask bits made out of leaves, sealife, birds, Australian natives, flowers, or insects.

Shelter in Place was commissioned by Home Of The Arts (HOTA), Australia, for The Children’s Gallery, curated by Caitlin Pijpers and Sarah Lewis, and its physical set up was made specifically with social distancing for Covid-19 in mind.

WHat is Human Now is a large-scale digital artwork combining generative visuals, and remixed and hand-scarn animated visuals. It showed at ZAZ10ts Gallery, Times Square, New York in 2020.

WHat is Human Now was a confluence of soco-cultural issues taking place in 2020 surrounding the pandemic and being alone. In this case, we considered how those who owned pets may be less likely to feel alone. Pets and other species were the silent savious of the pandemic that were often not spoken of when conversations of loneliness and social distancing arose in the pandemic. Pets were also a silent and innocent currency, being bought, sold, and handed in for adoption as human lives changed during the course of the pandemic.

Images courtesy of ZAZ10ts Gallery.

***Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the documentation in this section contains images of people who have died.***

Between 2019 and 2021 I worked as the Interaction Designer/Creative Technologist for Queensland State Archives, within their Engagement Team. My official role was 'Senior Engagement Officer'. Works included 'The Decision Machine' interactive wall, a projected interactive machine that remixes and creates Cabinet Minute decisions for the Australian Parliment, mixing humour, interaction, and historical knowledge from archival documents. Another example was the 'WOW Room' interactive exhibitions space, a new interactive gallery space that I spearheaded during my time at The Archives. I also worked with a range of prominent artists in order to make interactive exhibitions for them in The Archives' foyer gallery space, such as Donna Davis and Melissa Stannard. I also worked on digital-only projects such as AR face-tracking filters in line with institutional events and exhibitions.

This research investigates the nature of interactive and digital art for multispecies end-users, focusing on enrichment and play as a lens for positive nonhuman artwork interactions. I place this within a context of interactive art as enrichment for companion dogs and humans. The project speculates on a multispecies future for Anthropocenic arts in which the needs of other species are ethically considered. I contend that through knowledges from the field of animal enrichment design and animal care, we are better able to create artwork artefacts that cultivate enrichment. I use a Creative Practice Research approach that is informed by frameworks and processes from animal enrichment design, proposing the ‘CPR S.P.I.D.E.R.’ approach. I use methods of bonding through play in order to reflect on engagements between individual animals, humans, and artworks. This results in two main interactive art projects, including ‘IntraFacing’, an interactive game that decodes a dog’s body position through accelerometer and uses this information to give tasks to the human player.

From this I find that the artist can contribute to enrichment design through approaching animals as individuals, and that the artist must consider issues such as ethics and care in order to approach other species appropriately. This is important for the future of the technology-based arts, as current research in the field sees it attempting to move beyond human-centrism in design, aesthetic, and user-ship, and towards more-than-human interactions and considerations.

This project employs Machine Learning to listen to Grey-Headed flying fox vocalisations, and takes the liberty of interpreting these into corresponding human-perceptible concepts in real-time based on known research into communication methods of these species.

Grey-headed flying foxes are known to science to have up to 20 vocalisations with distinct meanings within five vocalisation ‘types’ (Christesen & Nelson, 2000). Of these 20 vocalisations, seven have so far been accurately learnt and translated for this project. This project follows a practice-based audio machine learning research design model, from audio capture through to classification with the help of bat carers and vocalisation experts, ending in a trained model free for public use. The public can take this project and, with the use of a microphone, decode flying fox vocalisations that it hears in real-time. While this tensorflow model has undergone a rigorous training process, I question how these learnt classifications are translated, and whether creative practice can be helpful in designing ‘creative interpretations’. I attempt this through poetic narrative and visual design, where each accurately heard vocalisation is turned into on-screen poetic animated text that aims to evoke the meaning behind each communication, such as a mating vocal, territorial vocal, a growl. This gives me the artistic license to interpret known vocalisations through creative practice. This project’s knowledge contributions include a dataset of categorised flying fox vocalisations, a trained tensorflow machine for listening to and identifying vocalisations, and a final artwork that interprets this data into digital poetry in real-time. Further research will be undertaken into the nature of creative machine listening for animal vocalisation interpretation.

This research investigates the nature of interactive and digital art for nonhuman end-users, focusing on enrichment as a lens for positive nonhuman artwork interactions. I place this within a context of interactive art as enrichment for wild flying foxes in rehabilitation care undergoing rewilding. This resulted in two main interactive art projects, including ‘The Quantum Enrichment Entanglers’ touchable and digitally-enabled sculptures. These sculptures send enrichment audio to each other based on when and how flying foxes are interacting with them, allowing humans and flying foxes to perform interactions together from ethical distances by both interacting with sister sculptures.

The project speculates on a multispecies future for Anthropocenic arts in which the needs of other species are ethically considered. I contend that through knowledges from the field of animal enrichment design and animal care, we are better able to create artwork artefacts that cultivate enrichment. I use a Creative Practice Research approach that is informed by frameworks and processes from animal enrichment design, proposing the ‘CPR S.P.I.D.E.R.’ approach. I use methods of ‘giving’ flying foxes artefacts in order to reflect on engagements between individual animals, humans, and artworks.

I find that digital interactive art, in particular, can expand enrichment opportunities by paying attention to levels of sensory exploration and interspecies relationships between end-users. This is important for the future of the technology-based arts, as current research in the field sees it attempting to move beyond human-centrism in design, aesthetic, and user-ship, and towards more-than-human interactions and considerations.

CurioCreatures, a collaboration with my long-term EphemerLab collaborator Jason Nelson, is a series of 15 locative interactive artworks that explore speculative 'extreme evolution' needed for different species to survive climate change. The artwork coaxes visitors into finding and experiencing GPS triggered animated and interactive digital creatures via their smartphones or devices in and around a city area, in this case Brisbane, Australia. CurioCreatures was commissioned by The Queensland Museum for Curiocity Festival in association with World Science Festival Brisbane.

This work's audience is geared towards families and children, using a 'collect-a-card' concept where audiences use their own phones to find and collect each character card. On this card they can interact with the creatures and learn more about them, including how they are being affected by climate change. Bringing important concepts such as climate change to younger generations is of key importance in this work, which we attempt through interaction, humour, and absurdity.

Drawing on my dual history as a digital practitioner and a nocturnal mammal surveyor, 'Diffraction’ considers the use of psychogeographic ‘dérive’ (Debord, 1956) for making playful digital text-based engagements specifically with nocturnal wilderness environments. It asks the user to consider and perform certain tasks specific to dark night, in order to experiment with dark spatiality and question nocturnal interactions with nonhuman others.

Traditionally, the psychogeographers and the Situationist International movement used dérive to focus on playful social interactions between humans in urban spaces. They wanted to allow people to get lost and find new adventures within their own cities. However with the ethological turn in the humanities and rising concern about our interactions with wild others and spaces, there has been a shift in focus across the arts and humanities away from the urban and the human-centric social, and towards the spaces that ‘matter’ (MetaMute, 2010; Bennett, 2010; Lorimer, 2015). ‘Diffraction’ moves the user out of the city and away from other humans, allowing for the potential of meaningful foot-led engagements with non-urban non-human spaces. Although, I would warn against using this work on cliff-sides in the dark. In attempting to move against the grain of many digital locative art or narrative works, Diffraction considers not just place-based, but time and light-based interactions.

Diffraction premiered at the Hardiman Gallery, Cork, Ireland.

Real-time sound art event, and interactive, touchable sensor-enabled plants producing sound and visuals.

Originally conducted and shown in both the Connemara National Park region of Ireland, and The Burren region, Ireland, and later in Binna Burra National Park, Australia and the Queensland Ecosciences Precinct, Australia, this project created collaborative biofeedback systems between humans, flora, fungi, and glacially formed rock using galvanic skin response sensors, to produce data-driven sound and video in real-time for a participatory live audience across hemispheres.

These live, open-air, and site-specific sound events only work if both subjects are living, and touching each other. The system used to create sound collects GSR feedback, which looks to fluctuations in skin that are often considered akin to the 'emotional biofeedback response'. Hence, this is a system that considers the emotional connection between living things.

if the forest wanders is an interactive projection mapping of the underside of a train bridge, that uses hand-drawn imagery of bioluminescent sea creatures and fungi, for Brisbane City Council’s Friday Night Laneways Organic Data festival. This festival was part of the World Science Festival Brisbane.

The work revolves around the central theme of the train tracks, from which an ‘xray view’ of the tracks above was made. A wandering forest of bioluminescence grew up over these tracks, and each time a train came through, they would be blown away, only to regrow with time.

The work was interactive in a number of ways. The audience can control a steam train that drives through the tracks, as well as setting off separate animations. As it is a working train bridge, trains often passed overhead, at which point a separate train animation would run in time with the overhead train, meant to look like an xray of what was happening above. A hidden speaker sets off sounds each time the work is interacted with by the audience.

Living in and around urban spaces is a balancing act for these creatures. They must endure all manner of dangers. Some animals have to cross tight rope electrical lines, and others must navigate dangerous roads, avoid human food or pets, or avoid bushfires to reach the safety of home or food and water. Despite the daily dangers, humans often don’t view these creatures as important members of our ecosystem community. Instead, our urban wildlife becomes our brief entertainment; an amusing peepshow experienced while walking from the car to the restaurant.

Step right up! ‘Balancing Act' is a series of three interactive animation boxes designed to emulate vintage peepshow machines, known as 'mutoscopes'. Bright LED covered arrows, reminiscent of a carnival penny arcade signage, point towards an extruded view portal embedded on a wooden box. This aesthetic creates a glaring example of nonhumans being seen as entertainment in urban spaces, rather than vital members of our global ecosystem.

These mutoscope boxes are made to resemble mammal/bird nesting boxes – the urban homes of such creatures who attempt to live in our concrete jungle. Housed at viewing height on trees in the Botanic Gardens, these mutoscope nest boxes become surreal spectacle for the vicarious, with a clear environmental message. Peering inside each box, an interactive animation is revealed: a small secret world where urban creatures, such as the powerline-tightrope walking possum, attempt to survive urban dangers. Audiences can assist these creatures by pressing buttons to help the animals navigate passed these dangers in order to reach home.