Seb Chan

As Bandcamp day winds up, there’s plenty of fantastic music to explore on this label too …

ACMI Unveils Full Lineup for 'Game Worlds' Exhibition ACMI has unveiled the full lineup for 'Game Worlds', its major upcoming exhibition dedicated to the art and impact of video games.

Super proud of the whole @acmimuseum.bsky.social team with Game Worlds now on full sale -> au.variety.com/2025/digital... … time to start planning your trip, customise your character, fill your inventory. Open Sept 18

Oh that will not be a problem

“it feeds the interconnectedness all of those funky and psychedelic and arty things and gospel right into your brain and right into the mainline of our living folk culture all over again”

Much sampled, so good to see this available for the youths …

Unsound Adelaide: Fri 11th – Sat 12th July 2025 To call Unsound eclectic is an understatement. It never fails to provoke, confound, seduce or dismay – often in equal measure, and often in the course of one set. Held across two nights in the Adelaide CBD it has become something of a beacon for forward thinking international and local artists irrespective of genre. It began, at the Lions Art Centre…

Unsound Adelaide: Fri 11th – Sat 12th July 2025

To call Unsound eclectic is an understatement. It never fails to provoke, confound, seduce or dismay – often in equal measure, and often in the course of one set. Held across two nights in the Adelaide CBD it has become something of a beacon for…

Unlocking secrets hidden inside the world's most precious specimens This view inside some of the most precious and rare museum specimens on Earth is helping scientists to better understand the story of life — and it's all done without a scalpel in sight.

We always hear about art museum collections and scans revealing things beneath layers of paint, but less often stories about the other types of museum collections … www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...

I loved this so much. The use of emulators too! Marcin’s history of keyboards book is also one of my fave things!

So happy to have _finally_ sourced a copy of this! It’s a fantastic synthesis of 400k words of oral histories conducted over the pandemic and captures a huge slice of sector knowledge, 50 years of practice, and method that museums have often forgotten

Telnet!

The second half of this excellent piece is worth reading twice for a zoomed out view of many policy shifts going back decades

Important Announcement Australian Design Centre (ADC) is an integral part of the arts ecology in Australia. This small, dynamic, independent organisation has nurtured and supported thousands of artists since 1964, presentin...

The Australian Design Centre has had its funding cut. Design is so critically important, and so under appreciated and unsupported in Australian culture. ADC is looking for partners, sponsors, or people who can help them keep supporting designers and makers. Please share.

Douglas McCarthy, frontman with industrial group Nitzer Ebb, dies aged 58 No cause of death given for influential electronic body music vocalist whose punchy, declarative style found fans across both rock and dance

😢 www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

Episode 103 of Fresh and New is (finally) in your inbox or trapped in your spam filter! Enjoy! This one is a long one with many threads all being pulled at once

A super good and insightful read about what happens to the ‘middle’ in culture ‘industries’

It’s worth noting that legal deposit only permits archiving, not necessarily rights of access into the future. It’s important to have varying approaches to game preservation (and software pres) - sometimes the historical stories of players & makers are more valuable in the future than just raw code

@acmimuseum.bsky.social collects _some_ games through intensive collaborative preservation, NFSA has legal deposit on games now which is meant to ensure every game made in Australia is sent to them for archiving. These are two different complimentary approaches - narrow/deep vs broad/shallow

YouTube video by ACMI – The Australian Centre for the Moving Image ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab

ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab is back Saturday June 7 ✨

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu4Y...

Amazing treasure trove in the Internet Archive

Big congrats!

We are all watching Anthony Green’s last call! 😢

Why we care about videogames ACMI Director & CEO Seb Chan outlines a manifesto for videogames at ACMI.

In all the #silksong rumours and manic excitement about @acmimuseum.bsky.social and the upcoming Game Worlds exhibition, there’s been a long historical commitment to games at ACMI - www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-...

A lovely piece from Cat Hope celebrating the life and strange music of Alan Lamb. @cyclicdefrost.bsky.social has also republished a piece from Issue 10 in 2005 on Lamb when the mag was in print form too.

GenAI ‘remakes’ (if you can even call them that!) have nothing to do with game preservation … obvs … lots of good stuff in this piece!

OMG WUT?!

Electronic Swatchbook version 2 – lots more public domain swatches, search by colour We meant to launch our Electronic Swatchbook v2 last year but it got buried in a slew of server upgrades and other projects. But here it is, now with nearly 2000 public domain patterns available fo…

Yes! Here’s an original 2009 blog post about v2 of the swatchbook - www.freshandnew.org/2009/07/elec... … those were fun days with an amazing team who’ve all gone on to other things at many places!

It’s one of the reasons people overseas knew about my teams work and was the genesis of so many things - and interest in the digital humanities work of the Powerhouse in the 2000s

17 Jun 2005 - Powerhouse Museum - Electronic Swatchbook - Archived Website - Trove Powerhouse Museum - Electronic Swatchbook website as it appeared on 17 Jun 2005.

Even the Trove capture didn’t seem to capture the downloads … webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20050617...

Sadly it seemed to disappear from the web sometime in the mid 10s - and there is no obvious way to download all those TIFFs (although the site’s front end is partially in the Internet Archive). It was also one of the first museum collection interfaces to allow open user tags! 2005!

20 years ago when I was at the Powerhouse Museum we did one of the very first public domain high res releases of historical swatchbooks. It even supplied the basis of the swatch by colour that was reused when we did the Cooper Hewitt work! www.core77.com/posts/3163/P...