Current Projects
The Australian Emulation Network: Born Digital Cultural Collections Access (AusEaaSI)
This ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities project is establishing the Australian Emulation network. AusEaaSI is building a community of practice using Emulation-as-a-Service that will share insights and generate new knowledge regarding the use of emulation to stabilise and access born-digital cultural artefacts in the media arts, architecture and design archives and collections of universities, galleries, libraries and museums.
Play It Again: Preserving Australian Videogame History ARC Linkage Project
This ARC Linkage project extends upon research undertaken in \Play It Again: Creating a Playable History… to capture Australian-made videogames of the 1990s, preserving significant local digital game artefacts, and investigating how these can be exhibited as playable software using the newest emulation techniques. This second phase has resulted in ACMI’s Play It Again II: Games Collection and extended The Popular Memory Archive, adding over 50 games from the 1990s.
Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a Method and a National Collection
This collaborative project funded by the ARC has focused on good practice methods for stabilising born-digital media artworks and testing emulation as a means for researchers, curators and the public to access these works and potentially explore possibilities for exhibition and re-display. Key outcomes thus far have included the Born Digital Cultural Heritage Conference (2023) and the recently published report by Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey, Cynde Moya, Denise de Vries, Collecting, Curating, Preserving and Researching Media Arts: A good practice report, December 1st, 2023
Past Projects
Play It Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games for Industry, Community and Research Purposes ARC Linkage Project
This ARC Linkage project resulted in the The Popular Memory Archive, an online resource for historians of technology and media and the public preserving histories of the production and reception Australian and New Zealand computer games. This archived version of the PMA contains research on 50 games from the 1980s. Play It Again 1 also resulted in a curated online archive of computer games held in ACMI’s collection: Play it Again 1: Collection of Computer Games