Conference Speakers

Gleb J. Albert is currently working on a book project on the history of software piracy and copy-deprotection as a transnational youth subculture (also known as the “cracking scene”) in the 1980s and early 1990s. He defended his PhD thesis in 2014 on early Soviet History and previously worked on the history of international communism and the labour movement in the inter-war years. In the course of his recent project, he launched the preservation project “Got Papers?” (https://gotpapers.scene.org/) aimed at making available paper documents of early home computer subcultures.

Rebecca Barnott-Clement focuses on the care and conservation of contemporary and Time-Based Art collections. Prior to her current appointment, Rebecca worked as a junior Time-Based Art Conservator at AGNSW, and as a contemporary art conservator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the 21st Biennale of Sydney.

Elliott Bledsoe has an extensive background in copyright, with a focus on the interplay between rights and creative practice. Elliot works part-time with the ADA and the ALACC and is the Co-lead of the Creative Commons Australian chapter. Elliot also runs Agentry, an arts marketing micro-consultancy that helps artists and arts organisations understand marketing strategy to be more and effective when telling their stories.

Andrew Borman has significantly expanded the collection of born-digital electronic games at the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG),. Andrew is also creating digital preservation strategies to safely provide access to both physical and digital games for researchers and guests at The Strong.

Seb Chan’s work on the digital renewal and transformation of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (2011–15) and the Powerhouse Museum in the 2000s has won awards from American Alliance of Museums, One Club, D&AD, Fast Company and Core77. Seb is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT, and an international advisory board member of Art Science Museum (Singapore), and board of the National Communications Museum (Melbourne), and National President of the Australian Museums and Galleries Association. Seb also leads a parallel life in digital art, writing and music.

Frank Cifaldi founded and co-directs a California-based 501(c)3 non-profit organization, Video Game History Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the history of video and computer games. During his twenty-year games career, he was also a journalist and editor for industry publications, as well as a producer and designer at game developer Digital Eclipse.

Euan Cochrane is an information management and long-term digital preservation practitioner. Euan leads Yale University’s Library’s digital preservation team providing digital preservation infrastructure and services across Yale University. Euan has a long history with, and passion for, emulation and software preservation and is leading a number of projects aiming to ensure historic software is preserved and made accessible for future generations. 

Candice Cranmer has worked in collections access and preservation for the past 10 years, and has a keen interest in innovative conservation methodologies. Candice is a co-convener of the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials (AICCM) special interest group Electron and a board member of Melbourne based, artist-run agency Composite. 

In collaboration with Julien Mailland, Kevin Driscoll published Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, a cultural and technological history of the French videotex network (MIT Press, 2017). His next book, The Modem World (Yale University Press, 2022) traces a prehistory of social media through the dial-up bulletin board systems of the 1980s and 1990s.

Jon-Paul Dyson has worked at Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, New York, since 1998. Jon-Paul supervises a collection of hundreds of thousands of video game related materials, the most comprehensive such collection in the world, and leads the development of highly interactive and artifact-rich exhibits at The Strong visited by more than half a million people a year.

Patricia Falcão researches and develops strategies for the preservation of digital and software-based components of artworks. Patricia is also a researcher in the Collaborative Doctoral Program of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in a collaboration between Tate and Goldsmiths, University of London, and has recently published Conserving Digital Art (2019).

Joanna Fleming has two decades of experience in the acquisition, curation, and long-term preservation of digital collections, and born digital audio-visual content. Working within Australian cultural agencies, such as the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, the National Archives of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales, Joanna has been a strong advocate for born digital collecting and digital preservation.

Maria B. Garda  has been researching digital media from the perspectives of genre, nostalgia and local history. Maria is an expert of media history; current work focuses on video game cultures and sustainability. Maria has been previously involved with several research projects, including: “Alternative Usage of New Media Technology during the Decline of People’s Republic of Poland” (University of Lodz, 2013-17) and “Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-1992” (Flinders University, 2017-18).​

Defecting from film to videogames in the 1990s to lead the production of Beam Software’s live action-adventure game The Dame Was Loaded (1996), David Giles helped build the Bog of Eternal Stench on the set of Labyrinth and has worked as a Senior Managing Producer at Sony’s Santa Monica Studios.

Dan Golding hosts Screen Sounds on ABC Classic, and is an award-winning composer and writer. Dan is the author of Star Wars After Lucas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and the co-author of Game Changers (Affirm Press, 2016), and created the soundtrack for Untitled Goose Game (2019), the first game soundtrack to be nominated for an ARIA award in history.

Dene Grigar’s research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of interactive media, born-digital literature, and net art. Grigar has authored 16 media works such as Curlew (2014) and A Villager’s Tale (2011), and curated exhibits at the British Computer Society, the Library of Congress and for the Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA). Grigar developed, the methodology for documenting born-digital media with Stuart Moulthrop, a project that culminated in Pathfinders (2015), and Traversals (MIT Press, 2017). Grigar’s most recent book is Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury Press, 2021), co-edited with James O’Sullivan  Grigar served as President of the Electronic Literature Organization from 2013-2019 and is now the Managing Director & Curator of the organization’s The NEXT. Since 2003, Grigar hs been Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews, and was awarded the Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professorship by her university in 2017.

James Halprin spent the decade of the 1990s making games at Beam Software studio Melbourne. James started as a designer on licensed Gameboy and NES titles and went on to lead Beams development of Cricket games for the global market for the sports publishing behemoth EA. These include Cricket 96, Cricket 97, Cricket 97: Ashes Tour Edition and Cricket 2000.

Stephanie is soon to submit her PhD thesis on girls’ gaming histories, girlhood representations, and coming-of-age themes in videogames; and also teaches for RMIT’s School of Design (Games). Stephanie occasionally freelances on girlhood games and girl’s games histories with her work appearing in Melbourne’s Metro Magazine, ScreenHub, and GamesHub, and in the academic journals Game Studies and Games and Culture.

James A. Hodges is an interdisciplinary information studies scholar whose research focuses on the materiality of digital evidence, and current book project uses digital forensics to reconstruct the political economy of software development among American counterculture veterans in the 1980s and 1990s. James is also Senior Book Reviews Editor for Information & Culture journal and Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography

Rowena Loo is an experienced archival professional, and currently leads a team at National Archives of Australia responsible for improving digital archiving capability across the organisation. Rowena previously worked at Queensland State Archives and State Records NSW, and holds a Masters in Information from UTS.

Henry Lowood is responsible for history of science & technology collections and film & media collections in the Stanford Libraries. He has combined interests in history, technological innovation and the history of digital games and simulations, headed several long-term archival and preservation projects at Stanford, and leads the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. He co-edits the book series, Game Histories, for MIT Press, and the journal ROMchip.

Christian McCrea lectures in the Bachelor of Design (Games). Christian is a writer on film, games and the popular arts, and has recently published Dune (Auteur Pub, 2019), which examines the 1984 David Lynch film.

Cynde Moya directs the Digital Heritage Lab in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. Cynde is active with the Software Preservation Network, and also works with its affiliate project, Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) and Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EAASI). Cyne serves on the board of the Australia Computer Museum Society and was Manager of the Software Preservation Lab at Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle, Washington.

Carolyn Murphy’s research interests include investigating the ways in which museum and conservation practices impact artists and their works held in museum collections, with a particular interest in installation, performance and time-based artworks. Previously, Carolyn has worked at several cultural institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Canadian Conservation Institute and the Queensland Art Gallery. Carolyn is a partner investigator on two Australian Research Council Linkage projects: Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum and Archiving Australian Media Arts.  .

David Murphy lectures in the School of Digital Technologies and Arts and is a co-chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group. David’s scholarly interests include platform studies, communication and cultural studies, and digital cultural heritage with research published in Games and Culture, The International Journal of Canadian Studies, and Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. 

Angela Ndalianis’ research focuses on entertainment culture (films, video games, television, VR, comic books and theme parks) and the history of media technologies – and how they mediate our experience of the world around us. Her publications include Neo-baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses, Science Fiction Experiences and numerous articles and edited collections.

Arieh Offman curates the Games Lab at ACMI, the Big Games Night In as part of Melbourne International Games Week and is lead programmer for the ACMI+RMIT Audience Lab.  He speaks and moderates on videogames regularly including PAX, MPavillion, SIFTER, Gameplay podcast and ACMI+RMIT’s Games Talks Series.

Melentie Pandilovski is a phenomenologist, art theorist/historian and curator, who deals with examining the links between art-culture/science-technology. Melentie has curated more than 200 projects in Europe, Australia, and Canada including International Limestone Coast Video Art Festival; The Rise of Bio-Society; Age of Catastrophe; Toxicity; and SEAFair. Melentie’s publications include Art in the Biotech Era (2008); Energy, Biopolitics, Resistance Strategies and Cultural Subversion (2012); The Apparatus of Life and Death (2012); and Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser’s Communication and Aesthetic Theories Revisited (2015).

Klaus Rechert is a researcher, leading the digital preservation research group at the University of Freiburg. Klaus was the principle investigator of bwFLA and has been the architect behind Emulation as a Service. Klaus is involved in multiple national and international projects related to digital preservation, reproducible science and research data management. Klaus studied Computer Science and Economics at the University of Freiburg and received a Diploma in Computer Science in 2005. Since 2013, Klaus holds doctoral degree from the University of Freiburg.

Nick Richardson has worked in film archives for over 25 years. Nick previously worked at the Film Archives of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), the ABC and the NFSA. At ACMI, Nick manages 250,000 moving image items ranging from 16mm film prints dating back to the early 1900s, videogames, to the latest in digital and VR art pieces with a particular focus on enabling public access.

Helen Simondson has worked in the arts sector for many years originally as a practicing artist, working across performing arts and film and in most recent years working in Museums. Helen worked at ACMI before heading to WA to take up the role of general manager of the new WA Museum Boola Bardip.

Helen Stuckey was the inaugural Games Curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2004-2009). Helen’s research addresses game history and the curation and collection of videogames. Current research projects include ARC linkages: LP180100104: Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s and LP180100307: Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and national collection.

Ross Symon founded Big Ant Studios which specialises in sports game including Cricket 22. Ross has a long history of combining leading edge technology and sport, including being the first to introduce non-linear video and real-time, in-game, predictive play analysis into the NFL.

Melanie Swalwell’s research focuses on the creation, use, preservation, and legacy of complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks. Melanie is currently leading three digital heritage research projects: “Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s”; “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a best practice method and national collection”; and “The Australian Emulation Network: Born Digital Cultural Collections Access”, funded by the Australian Research Council. An ARC Future Fellow from 2014-18, Melanie continues to research “Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-92”. Melanie is the author of Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press, 2021), editor of Game History and the Local (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (Routledge, 2017) and The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (McFarland, 2008).

Emma Witkowski researches esports cultures and networked media sports, networked careers in digital games, research methods for networked play, livestreaming & LAN tournaments from grassroots to mega-LANs, and high-performance networked team practices. Emma is co-director of the Playable Media Lab at RMIT,  has published widely in print (popular press and academic) as well as broadcast media,  currently sits on the board of the Australian Esports Association, and is working on a new research project on esports ecosystems with Essendon Football Club.