Adjunct Professor Hugh Davies (School of Design) appeared on a panel on global games cultures, contrasting perspectives from Australia, Europe and East Asia. Panelists explored how games offer rich opportunities for cross-cultural engagement, and Davies drew on his curatorial and research work in Shanghai and Hong Kong to highlight a striking difference in how games are understood across cultures. "In Australia we're looking at video games in museums, but for China there is an understanding of video games as museums. When you put Chinese civilisation or cultural cosmology in a game, it is preserving culture and it is sharing it widely," Davies commented.
Day 2 turned to Institutional, Creative and Collective Actions, spotlighting cultural institutions and practitioners around the world, and how they’re finding new ways to navigate the uncertainties of the present moment. The framing was broadly post-digital: the foundational problems of metadata standards and collection management have largely been solved. The harder questions now are about what comes next, and how to bake accessibility into practice from the start, rather than as an afterthought.
Two researchers, Dr Caitlin McGrane and Dr Jacina Leong, showcased findings from the ARC Linkage Project, Museum Digital Social Futures. The project is a collaboration between RMIT, AMaGA and ACMI, co-led by RMIT’s Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth and Professor Ingrid Richardson (School of Media & Communication). One key outcome – a free Toolkit for Digital Practice for cultural institutions to evolve their digital literacy – is launching in May 2026.
"Cultural organisations are already collecting rich, often overlooked insights about how their audiences experience and connect with cultural spaces. Our resource helps them interpret and share that information," said Dr Leong.
Associate Professor Troy Innocent (School of Design) – fresh from co-convening the Australian Posthuman Summer Lab, an initiative of RMIT's Planetary Civics Inquiry – contributed to a discussion on the intersection of climate, culture and technology. He mapped the spectrum of responses to the polycrisis: the entanglement of multiple, simultaneous and distinct crises playing out globally. At one end, dystopian resignation; at the other, a transhumanist faith that technology will save us. In between lies what RMIT Professor of Practice Rosi Braidotti calls ‘affirmative ethics’ – a posthuman framework built not on passive acceptance, but on active, transformative thinking: "Saying yes to the world, being worthy of it." He acknowledged that embodied ways of being and knowing are only new to Western schools of thought but have been longstanding practices for First Peoples worldwide.
