Gamification is a methodology that offers a means to spatially visualise the tangible and intangible heritage values of traditional knowledge, customs and cultural heritage sites of Australia's First Nations people. Traditional 2D geospatial information systems tend to situate just the debitage but often fail to represent the intangible heritage values enshrined in the United Nations Burra Charter. This Charter offers a framework for heritage management with multiple—sometimes conflicting—outcomes for heritage site management and a means for engaging communities to communicate these values so they are understood and explicitly addressed in the drive towards GDP and GNP. The Charter’s success stems from its flexibility in accommodating evolving notions of heritage, changing economic and political circumstances, and vastly different types of places. The Burra Charter was amended in 1999 and 2013 in response to developing practice and awareness of intangible attributes and the legitimate expectations of associated communities. I plan to showcase three case studies, each with contrasting values and heritage outcomes, illustrating the adoption of virtual heritage management over traditional 2D mapping approaches. The 3D immersive processes and procedures offer a more holistic and innovative conservation solution. Over the last two decades, as gamification technology advances, First Nation virtual heritage landscape environments have represented many traditional and natural environment values, in recent times, the advent of generative AI, can provide significant potential for First Nations knowledge management looking towards the future - but it's important to approach these technologies with enthusiasm but caution. Breaking down the potential benefits, challenges, and ethical considerations, there is not a great understanding of the benefits, nor the investment support for a nationally coordinated approach to virtual heritage mapping of traditional knowledge for preemptive protection and a failure of State and Territory laws to protect Indigenous cultural heritage due to the prioritisation of development for the general public good over the cultural heritage protection of the interests of First Nations minority groups.

444.2 is the distance in light years, between Earth and the first star cluster charted by the original stargazers in Southern Africa for technological and spiritual purposes.

444.2 is a VR film that looks at African cultures as cultures of technology by superimposing fashion performance with the virtual geography of the Southern African Large Telescope [SALT]. The project uses volumetric filming to capture Jessie Oshodi’s improvised and choreographed movements as digital fashion performance. These are cut to an original, cinematic score featuring the voices of artists from continental and diasporic African artists that carry the bodies of generations of black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC). Terrain and architectural data were captured using drone photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning of the actual site of SALT in Sutherland, South Africa, performing a geopolitics of location and the materiality of origin stories of this place. These processes confound time and space, breaking down the separation of past, present and future, and the binary of old and new knowledges.

World-building for 444.2 proposes a material-discursive, pluriversal and decolonial XR praxis by enacting the ideological and creative deterritorialisation of fashion and the story of technology through affective, and posthumanist virtual encounters.

A multi-sensory virtual reality work exploring plant communication, posthumanism and alternate forms of perception. Situated within an abstracted representation of Tully Arnot’s childhood backyard, the virtual environment of Epiphytes features a diffuse, shifting, magenta palette – suggestive of a phytomorphic (plant-based) interpretation of light and space. The work includes interviews with evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano, acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, and echolocation teacher/blind researcher and activist Thomas Tajo. These sonic elements are spatially arranged within a free-roam VR (virtual reality) environment, encouraging curiosity and exploration of the space, while generating a collaged conversational dialogue between these diverse theorists. Field recordings of local birds and other ecological sounds compliment these conversations, as well as foley representing the flow of water and nutrients through the trees, suggestive of a natural environment that is either fabricated, or fading. The audio is spatially controlled, using virtual reality as a powerful acoustic tool that can represent complex sonic constructions which aren’t possible in reality. Developed during the Australian bushfires, the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis, the work uses implied forms of nature; a passing scent, shadows from an unseen canopy, diffuse amorphous forms, to elicit feelings of solastalgia – a word coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht meaning an emotional distress at a loss of natural environments – while also encouraging a more symbiotic and interconnected way of being in the world, drawing on the existential premise of the artwork’s botanical namesake, the epiphyte. The work was commissioned by ACMI through the Mordant Family VR Commission and first exhibited in 2022.