“We wanted to think instead about what we could do that was more action oriented. We wanted to locate where we have agency and not just give in to sorrow.” ❤️

The Australian Creative Histories and Futures Project is running a survey to investigate data use across the arts and culture sectors. If you're a researcher, artist, or GLAM worker you might like to give your feedback: https://unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_78qwtk2SZhWOoku #glam

It is easy to dismiss this as a single publication ending, but it’s a wider _infrastructural_ loss - and as Louise Adler says, easy to close, very hard to rebuild. These decisions have disastrous long term consequences beyond a single slice of the cultural sector

This is _such_ an exciting thing we are able to have happen at @acmimuseum.bsky.social … don’t miss it

As Bandcamp day winds up, there’s plenty of fantastic music to explore on this label too …

Super proud of the whole @acmimuseum.bsky.social team with Game Worlds now on full sale -> au.variety.com/2025/digital... … time to start planning your trip, customise your character, fill your inventory. Open Sept 18

Oh that will not be a problem

“it feeds the interconnectedness all of those funky and psychedelic and arty things and gospel right into your brain and right into the mainline of our living folk culture all over again”

Much sampled, so good to see this available for the youths …

Unsound Adelaide: Fri 11th – Sat 12th July 2025 To call Unsound eclectic is an understatement. It never fails to provoke, confound, seduce or dismay – often in equal measure, and often in the course of one set. Held across two nights in the Adelaide CBD it has become something of a beacon for…

We always hear about art museum collections and scans revealing things beneath layers of paint, but less often stories about the other types of museum collections … www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...

So happy to have _finally_ sourced a copy of this! It’s a fantastic synthesis of 400k words of oral histories conducted over the pandemic and captures a huge slice of sector knowledge, 50 years of practice, and method that museums have often forgotten

Telnet!

The second half of this excellent piece is worth reading twice for a zoomed out view of many policy shifts going back decades

The Australian Design Centre has had its funding cut. Design is so critically important, and so under appreciated and unsupported in Australian culture. ADC is looking for partners, sponsors, or people who can help them keep supporting designers and makers. Please share.

😢 www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

Episode 103 of Fresh and New is (finally) in your inbox or trapped in your spam filter! Enjoy! This one is a long one with many threads all being pulled at once

A super good and insightful read about what happens to the ‘middle’ in culture ‘industries’

ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab is back Saturday June 7 ✨ www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu4Y...

Amazing treasure trove in the Internet Archive

In all the #silksong rumours and manic excitement about @acmimuseum.bsky.social and the upcoming Game Worlds exhibition, there’s been a long historical commitment to games at ACMI - www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-...

A lovely piece from Cat Hope celebrating the life and strange music of Alan Lamb. @cyclicdefrost.bsky.social has also republished a piece from Issue 10 in 2005 on Lamb when the mag was in print form too.

GenAI ‘remakes’ (if you can even call them that!) have nothing to do with game preservation … obvs … lots of good stuff in this piece!

OMG WUT?!

I've written a new blog post on the #trove API keys debacle that answers some questions raised by my first two posts, and provides some updates on recent actions by the National Library of Australia. https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/04/11/update-on-trove-data-access.html Please share! #glam […]

Organoids … www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

This is coming on September at @acmimuseum.bsky.social … which you don’t want to miss! youtu.be/NsE8wTSEhEY?...

AMaGA does not often make statements on issues beyond Australian borders, but as our sector is so internationally intertwined, it is vital to reassert the importance of memory institutions and the work they do - www.linkedin.com/posts/museum...

Melbourne friends - @acmimuseum.bsky.social is doing screenings of the new Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke visual album Talk Tales with Jonathan Zawada on May 8. See and hear it properly, first session has an exclusive live Q&A … don’t miss your tickets - www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/tal...

In a still slightly jet lagged mania, Episode 102 of Fresh and New is now winging its way to your inbox with more photos, chance musical encounters and reflections on last week in Boston. Check your spam filters! Enjoy!

Episode 101 of Fresh and New is now winging its way to your inbox with lots of photos and reflections on last week at Uni of Michigan. Check your spam filters! Enjoy!

Thinking about why public services should not be designed in the same way as private-sector ones. I've 5 points so far: (1) CHOICE: with v few exceptions, we get to choose the private-sector digital services we use but most public services need to be universal at the point of access (1/n)

As someone who runs a publicly owned ‘screen culture’ museum, I am likely biased in endorsing this perspective! Yes to public investment in an ecology of digital public spaces, and the requisite capabilities and skills to nurture them

For those faraway, like me, trying to make sense of things

It is with profound sadness that we mourn the passing of Jonathan Sterne, an extraordinary scholar whose groundbreaking work transformed the fields of sound studies, media theory, and the cultural study of technology.

Ritter Audiac cassette at the Sindecuse Dentistry Museum. “An audio alternative to anesthetics” - one of many amazing collection items …

"a binder clip delivers a very rewarding set of tangible pleasures... Your fingertips fit naturally into the handles’ rounded openings... And after the clip has been deployed, is there anything better than flipping down the handles and feeling them snap shut with that familiar thwap? I think not!"

"The IMLS accounts for 0.0046 percent of the federal budget, while museums contribute $50 billion to the U.S. economy annually." observer.com/2025/03/trum...

In a lovely coincidence, I am sitting in a great talk from @tjowens.bsky.social who _also_ happens to be at UMich this week!

UbuWeb, a pirate library of avant-garde artifacts, closed in 2024. But last month, they started the site back up again. “Archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression.” [ubu.com]

Super talk from @adrianhon.bsky.social on The Future History of the World in 7 On Screen Objects which was part of the post-FACT weekender. Strap in - it’s a lot of fun! www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-...

Great read - “It's a faith in collective society and a faith in the intergenerational future. We should be willing to put in the work and the money to establish this infrastructure that allows the cultural lives of communities and society as a whole to flourish”

Episode 100 of Fresh and New is winging its way to your inbox (or spam filter) at last! Written on Saturday on a 15 hour intercontinental flight but delayed by infrastructural failure (!) it has now flown the coop. Contains no less than 49 links and 3500 words this time! Enjoy!

No matter where you are, this is a good summation of the work across arts, culture and academia that not just to be done now, but ongoing

Server and dns issues at my end are delaying the sending of Episode 100 of Fresh and New … infrastructure sigh … but soon it will head to your spam filters and maybe even reach your inbox!

If you’re near Ann Arbor, I will be doing this on Wednesday night. Or some approximation of it. I’m spending the rest of the week with students and faculty workshopping many critical topics. umma.umich.edu/events/lectu...

Museum curator @astroblob.bsky.social from @acmimuseum.bsky.social reviews the Two Point Museum management sim, tries to reconstuct their Honk! Untitled Goose Exhibition inside of it, and comes out with recommendations for museums 🚁 - www.gameshub.com/news/feature... cc @freeassociation.bsky.social

Know a museum director who could benefit from a mentoring program during the early stages of a digital project? And whose institution is a member of ICOM? Here's an opportunity - icom.museum/en/news/call... [yes, @acmimuseum.bsky.social's CEO Digital Mentorship program has been consulted]

This tension btw older open access initiatives and the rapacious scale of GenAI harvesting bots is not resolved by blocking good actors!

Le Motel’s album is one of our picks of the year! Highly recommended