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VR AND OTHER IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES THAT REQUIRE MORE THAN JUST A HEADSET ARE OFTEN HARD TO TRANSPORT, MEANING THAT A RELATIVELY GEOGRAPHICALLY ISOLATED COUNTRY LIKE AUSTRALIA HAS OFTEN MISSED OUT--A [...]

This article discusses a selection of interactive and immersive works from the past twenty years in Australia and argues that these have emerged from a specific cultural and geographical perspective in relation to space and place. In the context of settler colonial or migrant Australians, who have fraught and unresolved relationships to place, technologies that intervene with and implicate the audience can further expand documentary's capacity to frame, interpret and challenge these relationships. In this article, we discuss five specific interactive and immersive Australian documentary works. Each of these projects re-frames an encounter with space and place through the methods by which the participant-as-audience is situated in relation to the subject matter and virtual environment. The article explores the controversial asylum-seeker documentary game, Escape From Woomera ([2003]. Australia: EFW Collective); Lynette Wallworth's Collisions which recounts the atomic bomb testing in the desert (2012); Oscar Raby's examination of history, identity and witnessing, Assent (2013); Joan Ross's examination of the colonial relationship to the environment in Did you ask the river? (2019) and Tyson Mowarin's VR of the Ngarluma people of North Western Australia and the threats to their culture and land in the VR work Thalu: Dreamtime is Now (2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here we set out to map, through epitextual moves, the first year of our practice-based research into 'diary performance', taking up Watkins and Krauth's call for 'new ways of "doing" and of "writing up" research that are discipline and form/genre relevant' (2016. "Radicalising the Scholarly Paper: New Forms for the Traditional Journal Article." TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 20 (1)). We offer the emergent methodology we call diarology much as it was discovered: chronologically, playfully and intuitively, through voicings, listenings, space for awkward silences and the serendipitous, and increasing attention to the métissage of our interleavings. We draw on the possibilities of playful practices both as means of inquiry and as sources of new knowledge, recalling Halberstam who encourages scepticism around modes of 'disciplinary correctness', suggesting they confirm the 'already known according to approved methods of knowing [but] do not allow for visionary insights of flight or fancy' (2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press). The outcome repurposes found materials to create new life narratives, each iteration finding form and gathering vitality within the extemporaneous/ephemeral architecture of 'essayesque dismemoir' (Murray 2017. "Essayesque Dismemoir: w/rites of elder-flowering". PhD Thesis, RMIT University). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]