Intangible and digital heritage
About
Rather than asking how institutions preserve assets, the group examines how heritage is performed, governed, and sustained across bodies, technologies, and communities. This research holds direct relevance for cultural producers, heritage agencies, and policy groups engaging with intangible and digital heritage forms.
Our projects contribute to national and international debates across heritage, archive, and museum studies; media and cultural anthropology; and performance and Indigenous studies by advancing three key areas:
- Precarious and emergent archives, including new media and obsolete technologies which challenge conventional assumptions about stability, authorship, and persistence.
- Intangible heritage, addressing the limits of preservation models in relation to performance, ritual, and embodied knowledge.
- Indigenous-led heritage governance, foregrounding community control over digital archives and audiovisual heritage.
Projects
Ishmael Marika and The Mulka Project / Australian Centre for the Moving Image — Indigenous Digital Archives and Governance
Analysis of the Mulka Project as a Yolŋu-led digital archive, examining Indigenous control over access, circulation, and care of audiovisual cultural heritage.
Alan Griffiths and Waringarri Arts / Carriageworks — Community Media and Digital Continuity
Investigation of community-produced performance videos as forms of digital heritage supporting intergenerational knowledge transmission beyond national institutions.
Wukun Wanambi and Buku Larrnaggay Mulka — Archival Art and Ceremonial Knowledge
Analysis of multi-panel video works as Indigenous archival art translating ceremonial knowledge into gallery-based digital installations under Indigenous authority.
Louise Lawson and Tate / MUMA — Intangible Labour and Museum Choreography
Analysing how embodied labour is documented, governed, and preserved as intangible heritage in museums.
Cassette Culture — Indigenous peer to peer networks in Arnhem Land
Research on Indigenous cassette circulation in Arnhem Land as community-governed archival infrastructure sustaining ceremonial knowledge and social authority beyond institutional archives.
Emergency media / Black Summer Bushfires — Digital Mediation of Disasters
Study of emergency smartphone apps during the 2020 bushfires as unstable digital archives shaping collective memory, authority, and knowledge in crisis contexts.
ACMI and Buxton Collection — Time-Based Media Stewardship
Research into institutional strategies for acquiring, documenting, and preserving time-based and digital artworks amid technological obsolescence.