AustLit

'Every day I eat my breakfast, pat my 16-bit dog, and leave behind the pixels that look like a log cabin, ready for the great digital outdoors. Today it's raining, so I don't have to water my regenerative corn stalks before I pick their ears for shipment. !at's handy, because I need to hike into the mountains and find pink-haired Nina who likes potatoes.' (Publication abstract)

'As I write this, I am watching you eat a fillet mignon steak out of a piece of roof tile. !e meat has been carved and sauced beside your table, and garlic bu and er is dripping all down your arm into a little makeshift gutter. I'm about halfway through a compilation video on YouTube: 'ONE HOUR of Gordon Ramsay hating on food.' I've seen all these clips before-many times in fact. Every few weeks or so I think about the time you told a chef his fried codfish tasted like "a breaded condom." My memory lately seems so overwhelmed with information and raw data, yet that one sticks. Let's say I'm writing to you today because you and I have been intimate, in a strange way. It's possible I've seen your deeply-wrinkled forehead more than I've seen the faces of some of my dear friends.' (Publication abstract)

'Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen were thanking the volunteers for showing up in unexpectedly large numbers: forty workshop participants, they said, would give them a great opportunity to test some scenes they could only have imagined on their own. !ey were already standing in a circle in Dancehouse; gently, out of a bag emerged objects, passed around one by one: an apple, a fan, a banana, a straw hat. !e pace picked up, soon exceeding what two hands can hold. !e objects were now coming from both directions at once - participants holding three, four apples each - vaguely guilty of causing bo and lenecks in this human chain.'  (Publication abstract)

'If there's one photo that definitively sums up the a and entions of my youth, it's one my dad took of me in 2002 in the study of our family home. In this image, a wet-haired, twelve-year-old me is #ping, my tiny face fixed on the convex glass of an enormous white monitor. While my fingers tap at the keyboard, my chin is nestled in the chinrest of a violin, its scroll resting on the surface of the desk next to an undisturbed bow.'  (Publication abstract)

'Last year we had a baby, an event that impelled us, literally and figuratively, toward a new body of knowledge. For the duration of the pregnancy - a temporality marked by both abstract and concrete milestones, periods of sickness and hormonal ecstasy, anxiety and optimism, and the intense, relentless, often absurd process of initiation into the bureaucracy of 'health' and the baby industrial complex, or what we came to refer to as Big Baby - we read. We read about gestation, labour, birth, breathing, perineal massage, public health, hospitals, postpartum recovery, baby names, baby equipment. We watched birth videos and listened to birth podcasts. We both work as academics who teach at an art school and so, while we went through the pregnancy, we not only read, we also wrote and taught. We wrote about bodies and the ways they are mediated in contemporary capitalism, we taught courses on the pornographic spectacle, we thought about the gendered and racialised production of subjects, and we studied the violent processes of settlement and the crucial but difficult work of unsettling history.' (Publication abstract) 

'Within moments of joining Swedish thinktank Piratbyran, anakata had formed a clear vision for the group. BitTorrent, a communication protocol, had been designed in the United States two years prior, and interest in its peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution capabilities was rising. Unlike more rudimentary P2P services, it had the ability to transmit large files. As a result, when he floated the idea of building a BitTorrent tracker, some of the more vocal members expressed their enthusiasm; the group was already hosting humour sites, image-hosting portals... why not another website? !is was especially crucial following the rise of copyright lobby group Antipiratbyran, whose activities were rooted in spreading anti-piracy propaganda: that "intellectual property" was a good, that jobs were being stolen, that piracy was killing creativity. But as ever, Piratbyran's primary purpose was to promote the sharing of information.' (Publication abstract)