Digital Projects
Below is a selection of digital resources that I have been involved in creating with others. These projects include everything from community storytelling archives and audio documentaries, to digital exhibitions and multimedia essays. I continue to be actively involved in a range of digital projects that share stories and ideas with wider audiences while also creating spaces for many others to share their stories. These digital projects form one key part of my larger program of public engagement and participation.
Current Projects
A Curious Trail of Animal Tales
This is an interactive, multimedia, storytelling project that explores the strange and fascinating lives of animals. This project brings together an assortment of animal stories inspired by the collection of the Chau Chak Wing Museum: from Classical pots depicting scenes of animal life and an Egyptian sarcophagus decorated with the animal forms of diverse deities, to taxidermy natural scientific specimens. Rather than collecting all of these objects together into a single space to create a conventional exhibition, this project has created an interactive trail of audio stories that weaves its way throughout the entire museum, leading visitors between selected objects and sharing stories with them along the way. The animal trail will launch in the second half of 2024.
Team: Julia Kindt, Thom van Dooren, Zoë Sadokeirski, and Andrew Burrell.
A Bird, a Flock, a Song and a Forest
This project is producing a multimedia essay on the critically endangered regent honeyeater. The piece will be published in the second half of 2024.
Team: Thom van Dooren, Zoë Sadokierski, Myles Oakey, Sam Widin, Timo Rissanen, and Ross Crates.
Past Projects
The Living Archive: Extinction Stories From Oceania
A multimedia space that provides a platform for people to tell their own stories, in their own ways, about what extinction means and how it matters in their lives and places. The Living Archive is grounded in the understanding that personal narratives have the potential to explore local complexity in ways that are relatable and meaningful, and that generate engagement, connection and attentiveness in this time of great loss. The archived project website is available here.
Funding: Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship 2017-2022) and The University of Sydney
The Urban Field Naturalist Project
Wildlife exists all around us: in our backyards, on our balconies, in parks and disused industrial areas. If we pay attention, these creatures are an invitation into an entire world of growth and decay, of communication and sensation, going on right under our noses. This project created a community storytelling archive and a range of resources to study and explore local wildlife, as well as co-authoring a popular book. More information is available here.
Team: Thom van Dooren, Dieter Hochuli, John Martin, Zoë Sadokierski, Andrew Burrell
Funding: various
The disappearing voice of the forest: Snail stories from Hawai’i
Exploring the disappearing land snails of Hawai’i with a focus on the entangled cultural, ecological, political, and ethical significance of their decline. This project produced an audio documentary with Jane Ulman, available here (alongside a book and a series of other publications).
Funding: Australian Research Council (Future Fellowship 2017-2022) and The University of Sydney