Issue 47: MMORPG launch
4 Nov 2023
Issue launch
FROM URL TO IRL ️
The Runway Journal team invites you to join us as we ‘press play’ on the launch of our latest publication Issue 47: MMORPG on Saturday 4 November, 3pm-8pm at ACMI, Federation Square, Naarm.
Meet MMORPG Guest Editor Riana Head-Toussaint and MMORPG contributors as we congregate for a lively program of talks, artwork viewing, dancing, and social hangs!
️ MMORPG launch program️
3:00pm
Doors open / Soft start
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4:00pm
Welcome to Country
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4:20pm
MMORPG Introduction by Sarah Hibbs (Runway Co-Chair)
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4:30pm
MMORPG Panel
Moderated by Mariam Ella Arcilla (Runway Co-Chair)
Speakers: Riana Head-Toussaint (Runway Guest Editor) and Neil Cabatingan (Runway Contributor) and Robin M Eames (Runway Contributor)
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5:30pm
Screening of Echoographies of the Invisible by Moonis Ahmad (Runway Contributor)
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5:40pm
Break / Drinks / Explore the MMORPG issue (viewing stations)
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6pm
DJ set feat. Aquenta
Our launch event is free and open to the public. Snacks and refreshments available.
The talks will be Auslan interpreted and live-streamed. A Zoom link will be sent to attendees on the day. When registering, please indicate your preference to attend in-person or virtually.
Please email Runway at runway@runway.org.au if you have any questions, would like more information, or have access needs Visit the ACMI website for access information and venue details.
ABOUT ISSUE 47: MMORPG
Issue 47: MMORPG is published by Runway Journal, Guest Edited by Riana Head-Toussaint and features ten newly-commissioned works by Chia Amisola ️ Emma Pham & Emma Harbridge Jonathan Craig ️ Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker & Vidya Rajan Kin Francis ️ Moonis Ahmad Naomi Segal ️ Neil Cabatingan Olivia Koh ️ Robin Eames
Housed in an enthralling new-look microsite, our latest digital issue MMORPG will explore data sovereignty, code switching, gamer culture, worldbuilding, anarchy and freedom. Enter a universe of interactive maps, game simulators, and digital archives to assemble our collective inventories and imagine new freedoms together.
About Runway Journal
Established in 2002, Runway Journal continued to be powered by a voluntary-run board of artists and arts workers based across Australia. As an artist-run initiative, our purpose remains devoted to uplifting emerging and underrepresented voices through our digital platform and commissioning programs.
Powered by a voluntary-run board of artists and arts workers based across Australia, Runway’s carves out an independent, artist-led space for people to develop, investigate and present ideas that move the world forward.
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Glossary:
MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) are internet platforms for online users to interact with each other in a virtual storyline, and is a combination of role-playing and communal multiplayer online games. Looking broadly, MMORPG combines elements of worldbuilding, including code-switching, internet architecture, parallel realities, avatars, speculative fiction, and cyberfeminism.
Soft start is a low-key entry time for you to arrive and chill, grab drinks, or have casual chats with the Runway team and contributors prior to the event commencing.
ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKERS
Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary crip/disabled artist, DJ and curator/community organiser of Afro-Caribbean heritage. She has made work spanning choreography, video/film, sound design, installation, and writing; often aimed at interrogating entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking, and advocating for social change.
Her practice sits at the intersection of creative expression, activism, cultural exchange and disability justice. She is the founder and creative lead of CRIP RAVE THEORY, a club night outside the club fostering more intersectionally-accessible rave/party spaces, and Headquarters disability-led digital space. Her curatorial practice is aimed at creating intersectional opportunities for connection between traditionally sidelined communities, and opening up space for greater embodiment. Her work has been commissioned, published and exhibited widely across so-called Australia and virtual spaces. Riana currently lives and works across unceded Darug, Gadigal and Wangal Country.
Neil Cabatingan makes rap and electronic music, videos and graphics and is based in the Western suburbs of Naarm. He is the founder of artist collective + digital platform CONTENT.NET.AU and is one half of the duo Teether & Kuya Neil. Outside of production he is a member of community collective Sound School, running low-cost electronic music workshops in Naarm.
Robin M Eames is a queercrip poet and historian living on Gadigal land. Their work has been published by Overland, Meanjin, APJ, and Lilith, among others. They are currently completing a PhD at the University of Sydney, researching 19th century trans histories.
WORK SCREENING
Echographies of the Invisible by Moonis Ahmad
Commissioned for Runway Journal Issue 47: MMORPG, Echographies of the Invisible by Moonis Ahmad is a 10 minute video journey of an unstable digital world constructed with an algorithm called The Game of Life by John Conway. The Game of Life is a cellular automaton which consists of a grid of cells that can be either alive or dead. The rules are simple: a live cell with too few or too many neighbours dies, while a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive. This simple set of rules can lead to complex and unpredictable patterns, that poignantly addresses the undecidability that lies at the base of Mathematics.
In this work, The Game of Life is used as the fundamental logic by which the digital world shifts, morphs, grows and de-grows into uncertain futures, thus constantly challenging its experience over time. The digital world is comprised of point clouds as well as photogrammetry scans of existing landscapes and ecologies. In addition to these imprints, the game incorporates spoken text and sound in the form of stories, myths, and mythologies related to the scanned places. The world, without naming these places, the work brings together complex histories and diverse experiences of time, suggesting an inter-referentiality between the occupied territories.
This world, its uncertain futures and the embedded sounds, audio stories and narratives addresses the lives of the dead and the deceased in the context of occupied and colonised territories. The work also explores memory as a possibility of speculating the experience of unlived lives, as well as conjuring alternative considerations of time by employing rocks rather than clocks as measures of time.
Moonis Ahmad (b.1992) born in Kashmir is an artist whose practice transverses various media such as installation, sculpture, computer programming, sound, and video. His work conjures the afterlives of the dead and the deceased as a means to speculate the emergence of counter-worlds that challenge established states of power at the margins. These lives, which refuse to die, emerge as spectres in his work, challenging the chronological understanding of time and the territorialisation of colonised space. Through such phantoms, Moonis speculates alternate ideas of time and being, intersecting various marginalities and temporalities to explore the besieged human condition that is inherently at an outbreak and yet, in a constant state of invisibility and exception.
He completed his doctoral research at The University of Melbourne in 2022.
He has shown his work at various solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally such as “Okkoota”, Arts House, Melbourne, Australia 2023; “Anarchic Archive: Spectres of Inconsistency” 2021 at The Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne, Australia 2021; “Atlas Holding the Heavens” at Vadhera Contemporary, New Delhi, India 2019; India Art Fair, Notes on Tending, FICA, 2022; “Beyond Boundaries”, at Auckland Art Fair in New-Zealand, 2018 amongst many others.
He has participated in various residential programmes such as his three-month Residency at Stadtgalerie & HSLU, in Switzerland organised by Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council amongst others. He is one of the co-authors of an upcoming publication by Raqs Media Collective called “Hungry for time” published by Spector Books 2022. He was also awarded the Schloss Solitude Fellowship, Germany in 2022-23. He is a recipient of Arts House, Makeshift Publics Programme 2022-23 in Melbourne Australia and has also won Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art’s Emerging Artist Award, 2017-18. He was a recipient of the Australian Graduate Research and Training Programme scholarship. Currently he is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and is based between Stuttgart, Kashmir and Melbourne.
Runway Journal - Issue 47: MMORPG launch event is supported by ACMI. Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body.
This event has now concluded.