M/C Journal

Introduction: Experience as Contested Territory When Gardening Australia became the first program to broadcast with audio description (AD) on the ABC in 2020, the national broadcaster received complaints from sighted viewers about why their televisions were suddenly talking to them. This accessibility feature describes important visual information between lines of dialogue to ensure audiences who are blind or have low vision have a comparable experience to people who can see the action unfold. In response to viewer complaints but wanting the AD audience to feel included, the producers of Gardening Australia integrated the new feature in a segment featuring Costa smelling a flower. In a watershed moment for Australian television, Costa explained what AD was, who benefitted from it, and how to turn it off. Despite benefitting so many people, AD was introduced in Australia quietly and with seemingly minimal audience response (Department of Communications and the Arts). While researchers and advocates knew there was a demand for AD (Ellis et al.), there have been consistent gaps and silences in achieving the type of critical feedback required to provide effective, engaging and consistent AD. However, as several critical disability scholars have highlighted (Hadley; Ellcessor), there are multiple reasons that impact on audience responses to media texts and accessibility features. In undertaking this research, we acknowledge the relational nature of access; both the constant emphasis on disclosure (Kerschbaum 55), and the (unpaid) emotional labour and problematic "accommodations loop" (Price 73) people with disability experience to justify and re-justify accessibility needs (Dolmage). The specific nature of AD, both often invisible and, until recently, isolated in production, may further compound these challenges. In this article we examine the "footprint" of social media responses to AD during the 2012–2025 period in which AD first emerged on Australian screens via ABC AD trials, Netflix, and its eventual provision on ABC and SBS and their catchup services. We focus on the transformative period between 2020 and 2025, when dedicated funding enabled Australia's national broadcasters to move from trial programs to sustained AD services. Prior to this, Australia was the only English-speaking nation in the OECD not to offer AD on broadcast television. The article presents an analysis of collected data from Facebook and Reddit posts responding to media or network AD promotions, as well as posts from AD, blind, and low vision groups in Australia. Responses and engagements with AD promotions and discussions were analysed to capture the experiences of AD, beyond the focus groups or survey feedback traditionally used by media producers. While limited to engagements from social media users, it also allows for informal expressions—both positive and negative—and for reflections from a diverse audience, including but not limited to the blind and low vision community. Theoretical Framework: Embodied Media Experience and Accessibility We ground our analysis of AD as an embodied phenomenon in critical disability studies, accessibility, and translation studies. Scholarly examination of AD proceeds from translational studies, media accessibility, and universal design principles (Mazur). While distinct disciplinary approaches, the embodied experience of AD has been at the centre of each tradition of AD research. Within translational studies, researchers conceptualise AD as a form of translation—the process of converting visual elements into verbal descriptions. This framework has yielded two significant insights. First, global legislative frameworks mandating AD provision remain sparse and inconsistent. Second, cultural variations substantially influence AD practices, as demonstrated by Orero's comparative analysis of American, Spanish, and Greek audio describers, which revealed marked differences in descriptive priorities when working with identical visual content (Orero). Research recognises that user preferences vary across the blind and low vision community, with no “one-size-fits-all” approach (Jiang et al. 1). However, other research suggests that even along the spectrum of vision impairment, AD preferences are not as distinct as expected (Chmiel and Mazur 565). The absence of unified international standards for AD implementation (Fryer) has resulted in diverse national approaches to both script development and delivery technologies (Orero). Australia's Department of Communications and the Arts identified this lack of standardisation as a primary obstacle to AD implementation in their 2017 Audio Description Working Group's Final Report. The absence of established standards has enabled innovation in the provision of AD, yielding valuable insights into user experience (Walczak and Fryer). More interpretive styles have been found to better convey emotional aspects of film (Bardini; Walczak and Fryer). Instances where directors have developed AD positively influence audiences' experiences while at the same time changing these directors' creative practice (Naraine et al.; Whitfield and Fels). Media Accessibility approaches position AD as a critical accommodation for blind and low vision audiences, framing it within social inclusion and human rights discourse (Ellis et al.). AD significantly enhances the user experience and comprehension of media texts (Khang Dang and Lee; Raffi). Media accessibility perspectives recognise television and other media platforms as vehicles for community participation, providing collective access to significant events, news coverage, and cultural content. The universal design approach has gained momentum as researchers increasingly examine how AD shapes user experiences through consumer advocacy and human rights frameworks, where experiential insights and industry creativity are reshaping AD delivery models (Ellis and Peaty 135). This scholarly direction recognises that accessibility features developed to enhance experiences for specific populations often generate broader experiential benefits, aligning with established digital accessibility trends and universal design philosophy (Bownlee; Locke and Leaver; Reena). Research examining mainstream AD adoption and user experiences (Ellis) exemplifies how disability-focussed innovations can transform media experiences for diverse audiences. Universal design creates mainstream products and services that optimise experiential usability across diverse populations without requiring specialised modifications. In the context of AD, there is an increasing interest in the universal design potential of AD. For example, research from the Macerata Opera Festival in 2018 indicates that AD improved the experience for both blind or partially sighted patrons and their sighted companions (Raffi). Studies across each discipline suggest a complex interaction between varying user preferences, describer approaches, and platform- and geographical specificity. AD therefore is fundamentally about embodied experience and the ways unique physical bodies, senses, and cognitive processes shape our interaction with technology. This article proceeds from this critical disability perspective, recognising that disability is the result of a complex interaction between bodies, environments, and cultural practices (Garland-Thomson). In this framework, disability is viewed as neither entirely medical (medical model) nor solely social (social model), but as a series of material, social, cultural, political, and other contextual influences and experiences. The embodied experience of AD exemplifies this complex interplay, as it emerges not simply as a technical accommodation for vision impairment, but as a culturally situated practice that reshapes the material encounter between bodies, media environments, and narrative meaning-making. This argument is further highlighted in the analysis of social media posts made by Australians about audio description between 2020 and 2025, a time during which AD was introduced on Australian television networks. Methodology: Social Media as Experience Archive There are many approaches to analysing social media posts and traces, all of which must make significant assumptions and orientations in terms of the way any social media utterance is valued and contextualised, including assumptions about the extent to which posts reflect a broader embodied experience. For posts made in relation to AD, the lived experiences of accessibility, especially for the imagined AD audiences of blind or low-vision audiences, are vital. For this analysis, these assumptions have led the researchers to situate social media posts not as a broader discourse to be understood holistically, but rather as offering windows of documented embodied experience that are not otherwise available outside of direct interview and explicit user testimony, but require as much consideration and interpretation. Zizi Papacharissi has convincingly argued that digital and social media analysis can effectively provide a window onto ‘affective publics’, spaces where the stories, ideas, and values of specific communities and groups cohere, are retold, and are amplified in particular ways. Social media are necessarily an incomplete and imperfect representation of communities that span digital and physical spaces, but are nevertheless a form of community and communication that is visible and accessible to researchers without further impinging on time-poor groups. Social media thus can act as a reasonable proxy for group sentiment and opinion. Moreover, while certain forms of accessibility are relatively visual and apparent, others (including AD) are often occluded and mostly invisible without being explicitly raised by users and audiences. Thus, social media for this project can illuminate otherwise hidden moments of documented experience appearing online, but always already situated in embodied and accessibility contexts. Our study focussed on two social media platforms, Facebook and Reddit, as relatively stable social media platforms at the time, and ones which are used by blind and low vision communities (noting that previously Twitter has been an active space for this community, but with its transition to "X", historical data are no longer available, and the platform itself more resistant to research and researchers; Bruns). Researchers conducted a broad Google search of public posts (source: Reddit; source: Facebook) using a variety of related terms: "audio description", "AD", "audio descriptive", "audio described", "blind", "blindness", in conjunction with Australia-specific and platform terms: "Australia", "ABC", "SBS", "Stan", "Binge", and "Netflix", "Vision Australia", "BCA". A closer analysis of posts within related groups (e.g. "Audio Description Discussion") or threads (r/audiodescription) was also conducted. Noting consistent references to specific programmes, the research terms were extended to include: "Gardening Australia", "Bluey", and "Nas Campanella" (a blind reporter for the ABC). 75 comments were analysed across two social media platforms; 71% of responses were from Facebook, and 29% from Reddit. There are several factors which impacted on the relatively small quantity of comments that were found and analaysed. Firstly, the search was limited by geographical reference (to Australian content or platforms) and time (starting from the month/year that AD was introduced to Australian broadcast television: May 2020—April 2025). Audio description was introduced to Australian television via trials conducted by the ABC in 2012 and 2015-16. Outside these trials, AD did not otherwise exist on Australian broadcast television until its introduction on both national broadcasters in 2020. Netflix came to Australia in 2015, coincidentally about the same time as the streaming service introduced AD. As other streamers followed, some also provided AD. Preliminary research noted that in 2012 there was no feedback on the AD trials via Facebook or Reddit as they were not well established as fora for feedback, reviews, and discussion of TV content. In 2015, the comments sections of television posts were more lively, however the ABC had a policy of not promoting the AD trial (Department of Communications and the Arts 11), thus also impacting on the quanitity of engagement via social media. After the formal introduction of AD in 2020, the volume of posts about AD by SBS and the ABC increased markedly. Secondly, in their early iterations Facebook and other social media platforms were notoriously inaccessible for people who were blind or had low vision. It was only after considerable campaigning that Facebook worked with the American Foundation of the Blind to improve accessibility (Ellis and Kent 129). Both the perception and the reality of this inaccessibility might also contribute to the low usage of social media platforms by blind and low vision AD users. Ellis et al.'s 2019 findings that many Australians were unfamiliar with AD are supported by the negative feedback from sighted Australians to the introduction of AD on broadcast television in 2012 and 2020 (ABC 18). Technical issues meant that some televisions played AD automatically, confusing people who had not heard of AD. Despite these limitations, the data reveal significant patterns around broadcaster preferences, sentiment towards AD services, and specific show discussions. Findings: Multiple Experiential Worlds The findings from our canvassing of social media comments on AD in Australia reveal the importance of access experience and quality content-driven provision. But the results also point to the fragmented nature of AD consumption. This sits uncomfortably beside the dominant discourse of AD audiences—clearly defined in literature (predominantly from the UK and US) as an accessibility feature for the homogenous blind and low vision community (Holsanova; Pergeo and Taylor). Moreover, the sparsity of vocal audience engagement with AD services (as described by one broadcasting service provider, "there have been no [feedback] at all for audio description in all of these years. I don't think I can remember a single enquiry at all about audio description") has perpetuated assumptions about the "intended user". In doing so, assumptions are not only made about the intended users’ "bodies, cultures, and technologies" (Ellcessor 64), but also of unintended audiences and unintended experiences of AD broadly. Intended Experiences: BLV Community Engagement While the "intended users" of AD were evident in responses, with several (9) self-disclosing their disability in their comments, the vast majority could not be discernible as posts from members of the blind and low vision audience. While beyond the scope of this article, the use and limitations of social media for the blind and low vision community requires further analysis (Whitney and Kolar 461). The sparse but meaningful participation by actual AD users prompted quality discussions (particularly in specialised communities) about voice, localisation, and technical aspects. These discussions also evoked international comparisons (notably in the r/Blind community), community-based sharing, and advice seeking. The specialised community discussions about synthetic versus human voices, accent matching, and local knowledge in scripting reveal sophisticated user preferences that contrast with the limited quality feedback in mainstream spaces. User frustrations about AD not transferring between platforms and countries (which become evident as posts about content missing AD in Australia are expressed and confirmed on international social media platforms) point to systemic issues in how accessibility features are implemented across different media ecosystems, warranting discussion of policy and technical solutions. The dominance of the ABC as the first national broadcaster to provide AD on its broadcast and catch-up platform was evident, noted in 34 posts. The ABC were the original poster (either marketing AD itself or specific programs for which AD was available), and as a result ABC content was likewise discussed, with blind reporter Nas Campanella, Gardening Australia, and children's television cartoon Bluey all referenced in multiple posts. Unintended Experiences: Mainstream Appropriation Indeed, the high engagement with specific, popular programming across the data divulged a series of unintended experiences and audiences for AD. Comments by sighted users, and families and friends of blind and low vision individuals, noted discovering AD as background listening, a language learning tool, and in adding depth and details to children's content. While these alternative audiences for AD have been noted in research over the last decade, there remains a clear omission in marketing to and including these diverse audiences in AD production and distribution. Resistant Experiences: Technology as Disruption Some posts revealed initial experiences for audiences with full vision who encountered AD accidentally, interpreting AD not as an accessibility option, but rather presuming it to be part of the mainstream experience of that media form. For example, one post highlighted a viewer who thought that a television programme had begun to include a new narrator in the show, only to be informed by others afterwards about the existence of AD as an optional technology. Other viewers aware of AD lamented that it was at times hard to locate and turn off, sometimes as a response to encountering content that featured AD for the first time, and discovering that their device had always had AD turned on, but that they had not before viewed a show that actually utilised the AD capacity. For audiences seeking AD content, the increased availability of AD on some streaming platforms was notably not available to users with older televisions, or the experience of streaming and broadcast was different enough to present new and unique challenges making this accessibility feature, ironically, harder to access. Conclusion: Toward Inclusive Experience Design and Co-Creating Accessible Experiences AD creates an equitable media experience for people who are blind or have low vision. However, social media discussions about AD reveal fundamental tensions between different experiential paradigms—from the embodied, sensory experience of blind and low vision users to the often-dismissive experiences of sighted audiences—highlighting how accessibility technologies create multiple, sometimes conflicting forms of media engagement. These different user experiences reveal both promising shifts for how media, culture, and experience intersect, and a persistent fundamental tension between different sectors of the imagined television audience. The coexistence of sighted and blind users in mainstream AD discussions suggests AD could become community-centred and integral to design, rather than an accessibility add-on. Across both groups, important insights about technology (old and new), cultural preferences, and the broader media culture demonstrate how media accessibility interpolates with both shared cultural experiences (Australian accents, local knowledge) and unique individual needs (specific vision conditions, personal preferences). Technical frustrations, from turning the feature off to incompatible televisions to platform migration failures, illuminate assumptions about technological literacy and infrastructure access. When AD fails to transfer between services, it reveals accessibility treated as an add-on rather than core design principle. These barriers reflect user experience paradigms that assume universal access to current technology while overlooking compounded barriers facing disabled communities. Sophisticated discussions within blind and low vision communities about synthetic versus human voices, accent authenticity, and cultural context demonstrate how users incorporate media consumption with lived experiences in ways that challenge simplified accessibility assumptions. Audio description becomes cultural practice intersecting with identity, place, and community belonging, not merely functional accommodation. As the burgeoning Australian AD market has developed in recent years, AD providers have struggled to understand the lived experiences of their blind and low vision audience members. While traditional feedback mechanisms often fall short, social media platforms have emerged as spaces where users document and discuss their encounters with audio-described content. This study examines social media discourse about AD to better understand how Australian users experience this accessibility service in their daily media consumption to analyse the nuanced ways audiences engage with, critique, and celebrate AD as part of their viewing experiences. In concluding this article, we echo calls evident in the social media discussion for AD guidelines and standards to be co-created with disabled communities. True participatory design requires recognising disabled users as accessibility experts whose knowledge should fundamentally shape media technology conception, development, and implementation. As we reflect on the evolving landscape of AD translation, accessible media, and universal design in the context of AI now entering the AD creation space, we predict increasing cultural and technical complexity. Questions of lived versus apparent experience that will ultimately be raised in this landscape call for more inclusive consultation processes. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Report to Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Audio Description Trial on ABC Television, Dec. 2012. . Bardini, Floriane. "Film Language, Film Emotions and the Experience of Blind and Partially Sighted Viewers: A Reception Study." The Journal of Specialised Translation 33 (2020): 259-80. . Bownlee, John. "How Designing for Disabled People Is Giving Google an Edge." Co.Design, 23 May 2016. . Bruns, Axel. “The Death of Twitter and the Decline of Public Debate Online.” M/C Journal 29.2 (2026). . Chmiel, Agnieszka, and Iwona Mazur. "A Homogenous or Heterogeneous Audience? Audio Description Preferences of Persons with Congenital Blindness, Non-Congenital Blindness and Low Vision." Perspectives 30.3 (2021): 552-67. . Department of Communications and the Arts. "Audio Description Working Group—Final Report." Australian Government, 2017. . Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2013. Ellcessor, Elizabeth. Restricted Access. New York: NYU P, 2016. Ellis, Katie. Disability and Digital Television Cultures: Representation, Access, and Reception. London: Routledge, 2019. Ellis, Katie, and Gwyneth Peaty. "Audio Description as Transmedia." Transmedia Cultures: A Companion. Ed. Simon Bacon. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021. 135-42. Ellis, Katie and Michael Kent. Disability and New Media. London: Routledge, 2011. . Ellis, Katie, Mike Kent, and Kathryn Locke "Audio Description and Australian Television: A Position Paper." Curtin University, 2018. . Fryer, Louise. 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The body knows before the mind does. A chest tightens over an image of an empty chair. The hands will not put the book down. A line of poetry activates something behind the sternum that has no name in the critical vocabulary, and so the scholar, trained in distance, sets it aside. This article argues that what gets set aside is not noise but data: the body's participation in reading is a condition of critical thought rather than an obstacle to it. It proposes neuroaffective reading as a method for treating embodied, affective, and temporally uneven engagement with texts as analytically productive rather than as other to a discipline trained to keep the body out of the argument. The term "neuroaffective" signals a double orientation. It draws on Critical Neurodivergent Studies, the framework I set out in "Uploading the Mask" (Ezzy, "Uploading the Mask"; Ezzy, Critical Neurodivergent Studies), which insists that neurodivergent ways of processing produce knowledge rather than merely deviating from it (Walker 31; Yergeau 45–7). It also draws on affect theory as a tradition that takes seriously what happens in and between bodies when texts circulate. Affect, as Brian Massumi argues, is not emotion named and contained but intensity in motion, a bodily capacity that precedes and exceeds conscious feeling (25–28). Reading, on these terms, is never a purely cognitive act but a sensory event. By "neuroaffective", a term this article coins, I mean the somatic, affective, and attentional traffic between a work and a reading body. A neuroaffective reading treats that traffic, its intensities, rhythms, and residues, as evidence, and takes neurodivergent embodiment as an epistemic resource rather than as a confound to be controlled. The article outlines a practical framework, demonstrated through three contrasting texts: Oliver Jeffers's picture book The Heart and the Bottle, a lyric poem from Ellen van Neerven's Comfort Food, and Maggie Nelson's fragmentary essay Bluets. Each stages a different encounter between text and nervous system, and no two nervous systems stage it identically; the readings that follow are offered not as claims about what every reader must feel but as demonstrations of a method each reader brings to their own embodied particularity. The same text layers different loads on different bodies according to sensory profile, cultural memory, and lived experience; we have simply been trained not to notice. Affect, Embodiment, and the Problem of the Trained Reader Academic reading, as conventionally taught, operates according to a set of unspoken somatic instructions. Moderate your response. Maintain critical distance. Do not linger, do not be undone. Rita Felski names the disciplinary mood that underwrites these instructions: critique as a suspicious, guarded vigilance that has come to define what professional reading feels like (1–3). I name this ensemble of instructions the neuronormative reading contract: the tacit agreement that a competent reader will process texts at a neurotypical pace and intensity. The claim is scoped to a dominant training, not to academia entire. Phenomenological traditions return to their texts across readings; feminist scholars have organised a politics of slow scholarship against the accelerated university (Mountz et al.); Indigenous knowledge traditions have long practised sustained, ethically attentive engagement. Neuroaffective reading is an ally of these practices, not a correction to them. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified one consequence of the training in her account of paranoid reading: a hermeneutic posture oriented toward suspicion, mastery, and the anticipation of bad news (123–4). But Sedgwick also insisted that reparative postures were possible, characterised by surprise, hope, and what she called "texture", the quality of a surface as felt by the reading body (13–5). Neuroaffective reading takes the reparative turn seriously and extends it into territory she did not fully explore: neurodivergent bodies as sites of critical knowledge. Teresa Brennan's account of affect is useful here: it is not generated privately within individual subjects but moves between bodies, altering physiology as it goes (1–5). A text, on this account, is not a container of meaning to be opened by interpretation. It is a transmitter. The reader who feels their breathing change over a page-turn is not having a merely private reaction that critical method is entitled to discount; the response is subjective only in the trivial sense that all response is, and subjectivity does not disqualify it as evidence. For neurodivergent readers these dynamics are often amplified. Autistic processing frequently, though not uniformly, involves heightened sensory sensitivity, intense pattern recognition, and perseverative attachment to objects of interest (Yergeau 53–5); the style labelled ADHD involves, in many presentations, uneven attention, hyperfocus, and affective dysregulation that makes the boundary between reader and text porous (Ashinoff and Abu-Akel 1–5). These are not deficits but processing styles that generate distinctive knowledge moderated reading cannot access. Neuroaffective reading does not require the reader to be neurodivergent, but it takes neurodivergent embodiment as an epistemic resource: a way of knowing what texts do to bodies that the instruction to moderate, distance, and move on has obscured. Bessel van der Kolk's account of the body keeping the score of what the mind cannot yet narrate shows somatic knowledge preceding propositional knowledge (van der Kolk); neuroaffective reading carries that insight from the clinic to the reading chair. A Practical Framework A note on the term first. Neuroaffective reading is my own coinage; the adjective circulates in the brain sciences (Panksepp 9–15) but has not before named a literary-critical method, and it inherits from the queer reading practices that first taught the discipline that how one reads is itself political, an inheritance Nick Walker's account of neuroqueering makes explicit (Walker). The framework routes several traditions through neurodivergent bodies as readers: Sedgwick's reparative reading (123–51), Brennan's affective transmission (1–5), Kathleen Stewart's ordinary affects (1–7), the autoethnographic treatment of the researcher's body as evidence (Adams et al. 21–6), and, in its fifth commitment, Lauren Berlant's attachments to objects that go on mattering (23–7). What follows is organised around five methodological commitments, each treating embodied response as data rather than distraction. The first is bodily notation: the systematic tracking of physical responses during and immediately after reading, muscle tension, breath changes, postural adjustments, and the often-overlooked interoceptive signals of gut feeling, chest pressure, throat constriction. These are not metaphors but somatic events, and they constitute evidence about what a text is doing at the level of the autonomic nervous system. The second is attention mapping: documenting where hyperfocus lands, where attention scatters, where the eye returns compulsively, and where it refuses to settle. The neuroaffective reader treats this unevenness as a map of the text's affective architecture, the way it organises intensity. The third is repetition and return. Rereading is not a failure of comprehension but a form of critical practice. The compulsion to return, to a sentence, an image, a page-turn, is the text exercising an affective pull that conventional method would resolve prematurely. The fourth is temporal unevenness. Reading does not happen at a uniform pace: some passages metabolise quickly, others require hours, days, or repeated encounters across years. The method values the slow and recursive as conditions of deep engagement rather than signs of inefficiency. The fifth is affective persistence: the refusal to let go of a text's emotional demands, to continue being reorganised by a work long after the encounter is supposedly complete. What is coded as a failure of professional boundaries is not the persistence but its visible affect, and neuroaffective reading reframes that visibility as ethical attention: a willingness to remain answerable to what a text has asked of the body. In practice the commitments are kept with humble instruments: a reading journal recording somatic events alongside the passages that produced them, marginal notation marking where breath changed or attention snagged, a log of returns. None of this requires apparatus beyond a pencil, only the decision to treat such notations as part of the scholarly record rather than as private residue to be cleaned from the argument. Reading One: The Chest Knows First Oliver Jeffers's The Heart and the Bottle tells of a girl who, after a devastating loss, removes her heart and places it in a bottle for safekeeping; without it the world loses its wonder, and only when a younger child helps her break the bottle open does feeling return. The narrative is spare; the illustrations do the affective labour, distributed across word, image, and the page-turn. Multimodal literacy scholarship makes a cognate point: meaning in the picture book is produced in the traffic between word, image, and design (Serafini). Consider what happens in the body at the page-turn that marks the loss. The spread before it shows the girl and a grandparent sharing a chair by a window against a warm palette, their wonder rendered as collage. Then the page turns, and the chair is empty, the palette cooled to moonlit greys and blues. No text explains. The body responds before reflective interpretation arrives. On a phenomenological account the body is already interpretive, the vehicle of being-in-the-world rather than its antecedent (Merleau-Ponty); what is marked here is the interval between registration and articulate reading. There is a stillness in the chest, not metaphorical but physiological, a held breath, a tightening around the sternum. The autonomic nervous system registers the withdrawal of warmth and produces a constriction that mirrors what the protagonist is about to do: enclose her heart. This is what Brennan means by the transmission of affect (1–5). The text has altered the reader's physiology before saying anything interpretable. For neurodivergent readers whose sensory processing amplifies interoceptive signals, this page-turn can be almost unbearable. The conventional move would name the technique, visual absence signifying grief, and advance. Neuroaffective reading refuses the advance and asks what happens if you stay, if you refuse the page-turn and sit with the shared-chair spread, letting the body anticipate a loss it now knows is coming. The page-turn reveals itself as an affective threshold, and the reader's impulse to manage the intensity of the preceding image, to turn the page, to contain, is the bottle. Hyperfocus lands not on the dramatic images but on these transitional thresholds. Reading Two: The Mouth Remembers Ellen van Neerven's Comfort Food operates in a register at once intimate and political, grounded in Mununjali Country (Beaudesert region, south-east Queensland) and in the sensory textures of food, family, and belonging. They are poems of embodied sovereignty, of nourishment as political practice, sovereignty meant in Aileen Moreton-Robinson's sense: not a status conferred from outside but an ontological belonging carried in and by the body (Moreton-Robinson). A neuroaffective reading begins in the mouth, not because reading happens there but because that is where the poems land first. Van Neerven's language does not simply describe food; it activates the gustatory and tactile systems, so that lines about cooking generate the phantom warmth of a kitchen. These are somatic events, what Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense (32–7), produced by the interaction between linguistic texture and sensory memory. The body participates in the poem before the mind arrives at meaning, and the knowledge produced is about relation, about what it means to receive sustenance from Country: it exists in the body's response and nowhere else. Attention mapping reveals a distinctive architecture: the poems draw hyperfocus toward small sensory details, a texture, a taste, a quality of light, then open with sudden force into wider political significance. What the reader's body brings matters: a reader raised on these foods meets the poems through recognition, one outside the culture through curiosity, itself a bodily orientation that opens the sensorium toward what it does not yet know. For the non-Indigenous reader that difference is part of the method's data: the poems make palpable the position from which one reads, a discipline Jeanine Leane has argued settler readers rarely practise and always need (Leane). "Chips" is the clearest case: the foodstuff draws hyperfocus through repetition before the poem opens onto the violence of the national dialogue, the shift in scale registering in the body before cognition catches up. The turn arrives as a question that answers itself: "what is happening / with the dialogue of this country / they are killing people with words" (van Neerven 21). Temporal unevenness is especially productive here: van Neerven's poems do not yield their full resonance on a single encounter, and each return activates different bodily responses depending on what the reader brings, hunger, grief, tenderness, the memory of a kitchen. The poem is not a fixed object to be decoded but a living relation, and the body keeps knowing differently. Reading Three: The Book That Will Not Let You Go Maggie Nelson's Bluets is a fragmentary essay: 240 numbered propositions about the colour blue, desire, loss, and the body. Its form anticipates the method. On the page it borrows the look of philosophy, short prose blocks headed by numerals and islanded in white space, and its associative structure mirrors the way neurodivergent attention moves through material: not linearly but in loops, spirals, and sudden lateral leaps (Yergeau 53–5). The work's refusal to resolve its emotional contradictions demands precisely the affective persistence that conventional reading would treat as a problem. Bluets does not ask to be mastered. It asks to be carried. Bodily notation produces an unusual finding. Where Jeffers's picture book generates a dramatic somatic event, the chest-constriction, the held breath, Bluets produces something subtler and sustained: a recalibration of the sensorium. Reading the propositions, the body enters a state of heightened chromatic awareness; blue begins to appear in the peripheral visual field, and attention sharpens and diffuses at once, as if the text were tuning the nervous system to a frequency it does not ordinarily occupy. This is what Massumi would recognise as affect in its autonomic dimension, a shift in the body's capacity to be affected, prior to and in excess of any conscious emotional state (25–7). Nelson's propositions produce not feeling in the conventional sense but a readiness for feeling, an orientation toward blue that persists outside the text, colouring perception for hours after the book is closed. Attention mapping reveals that Bluets distributes intensity unevenly across its numbered sections. Hyperfocus does not land where conventional analysis would predict, not on the sections dealing explicitly with loss or desire, but on apparently minor propositions: a description of light, a reference to a pigment, a syntactic turn the body registers as significant before the mind can say why. Mapped across multiple readings, these patterns expose the text's affective infrastructure, the way it distributes weight below the level of propositional content. The body reads the architecture before the mind reads the argument. These findings sit alongside the reception of Bluets as autotheory (Fournier 1–7); neuroaffective reading adds an account of what the fragment form does to the reading body. Repetition and return are central because the text is structured around them. Nelson returns to blue, to the beloved, to suffering, in loops that intensify rather than resolve, and the reader's own compulsion to return extends that logic. Here Sara Ahmed's stickiness is operative: the text accumulates affective charge with each return, becoming more capable of acting on the body (89–92). The reader who carries Bluets for years is not failing to finish but in the middle of a neuroaffective reading that has no terminal point. What Neuroaffective Reading Exposes These three readings, across the picture book, the lyric poem, and the fragmentary essay, demonstrate that the method generates critical insights unavailable to approaches requiring the reader to moderate embodied response. But it does more than produce new readings: it exposes normative assumptions embedded in academic cultures of interpretation, so naturalised they operate beneath notice. The first is that good reading is moderate reading. Scholarly training teaches readers to temper response, to achieve a distance coded as objectivity but functioning as affective regulation calibrated to neurotypical norms. The reader who cannot stop rereading, who feels a text in the gut for weeks, is positioned as unprofessional rather than attentive. Neuroaffective reading reveals this moderation as a disciplinary choice, one that systematically excludes readers whose bodies do not conform to its rhythms. The second is that reading should be efficient. The expectation that a competent reader processes texts in a single pass reflects a productivist logic; some texts require encounters that unfold over months or years, and the knowledge produced by the fifteenth reading is not the same as the first. The third is that care is unprofessional. The scholar who cares too visibly risks being perceived as lacking rigour. As feminist and disability scholars have long argued, the labour of caring is consistently coded as intellectually less serious than the labour of critique, a devaluation documented across accounts of dependency work, care ethics, and crip theory (Ahmed 12–4; Kittay 29–35; Puig de la Bellacasa 1–10; Piepzna-Samarasinha 32–41). Neuroaffective reading revalues care as a critical practice: sustained emotional engagement is not the absence of rigour but a different and necessary form of it. Neuroaffective reading does not claim a universal account of the reading body; embodied response is shaped by disability, race, gender, class, and cultural context in ways the method cannot flatten. For the same reason the article speaks, wherever it can, of neurodivergent bodies in the plural: there is no single neurodivergent body, only particular bodies made to share a political label. What it does claim is that the systematic exclusion of embodied engagement from scholarly reading represents an epistemic loss, one particularly damaging for neurodivergent scholars but impoverishing for the discipline as a whole. Conclusion Neuroaffective reading is proposed not as a replacement for existing methods but as an inclusive framework that expands what counts as critical reading. It asks scholars to notice the body, to attend to the chest, the hands, the gut, the quality of attention itself, and to treat what the body knows as evidence rather than interference. Demonstrated across a picture book, a poetry collection, and a fragmentary essay, the method produces knowledge that embodied engagement made possible and that distance would have foreclosed. The body reads. It has always read. Neuroaffective reading is simply the decision to listen. References Adams, Tony E., et al. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. Oxford UP, 2015. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Ashinoff, Brandon K., and Ahmad Abu-Akel. “Hyperfocus: The Forgotten Frontier of Attention.” Psychological Research 85.1 (2021): 1–19. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004. Ezzy, Tess. Critical Neurodivergent Studies. Vernon Press, forthcoming. ———. “Uploading the Mask: Late Diagnosis, Paternal Loss, and the Neurodivergent Afterlife.” M/C Journal 29.3 (2026). DOI: 10.5204/mcj.3274. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT P, 2021. Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing. 2nd ed. Bantam Books, 1981. Jeffers, Oliver. The Heart and the Bottle. HarperCollins, 2010. Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge, 1999. Leane, Jeanine. “Other People’s Stories.” Overland 225 (2016). . Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. Routledge, 2012. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Mountz, Alison, et al. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14.4 (2015): 1235–59. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford UP, 1998. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003. Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy. Teachers College Press, 2014. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP, 2007. Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014. Van Neerven, Ellen. Comfort Food. U of Queensland P, 2016. Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press, 2021. Yergeau, M. Remi. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke UP, 2018.

The experience of visual arts is synonymous with exploring new ways of thinking and making in the studio. As a practice-led researcher, I explore in this article how my acts of ‘translation’ serve as catalyst and intervention to my familiar approaches to studio practice; specifically, I explore my experience translating videogame tropes into figurative painting. Translation goes beyond the reworking of a text for a new audience or language. Broadly speaking, translation is any attempt to shift meaning, content, or expression between different modalities, while intending to preserve an essence of the original. In the context of visual arts practice, this term still encompasses shifts between cultural and linguistic frameworks, but also between alternative modes of representation (words and images) and different creative disciplines. It is not difficult to apply conceptions of cultural translation to studio practice as both culture and artmaking are performed and embodied. Culture is expressed socially as a living framework, not simply as reflections of a “fixed tablet of tradition” (Bhabha 2). Artmaking is undeniably intertwined with the cultures and contexts from which artists practice, while engaging with art necessitates reiterative acts of communication and interpretation. Just as with cultural translation, creative practice negotiates conceptual and material shifts between different approaches to thinking and making. Cultural Translation and Creativity Dialogue between different positions, perspectives, and/or practices is a source of creativity and emergence; all dialogue between difference necessitates some level of translation. Influential cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis argues that translation embodies transformation and innovation through a “robust process of mutation, appropriation, assemblage and reconfiguration” (7). This is a process where cultural entities move from one cultural framework to another as they are reactivated, recoded, and re-evaluated within (and by) the frameworks of the recipient; however, when entities move between frameworks, there is always an “unevenness or non-equivalence [that] inspires both a lament for what is lost in translation and a celebration of the extension in conceptual understanding through creative improvisation and hybridization” (Papastergiadis 5). Improvisation may reveal similarities between positions, but there will always be “an uneven fit” (Papastergiadis 5) that ensures an accurate replication of meaning cannot be absolute. Attempts to bridge incommensurability often lead to novelty and critical self-reflection; seminal cultural theorist Homi Bhabha asserts that it is from negotiations between different, competing, and even antagonistic priorities and practices that new understandings and hybridities emerge (210–1). From a creativity standpoint, translation is an outward-looking process that embraces new ideas, establishes new connections, and shows a “commitment to imagining” alternative ways of being (Papastergiadis 11)—or as cultural and literary theorist Caryl Emerson aptly posits, translation is never about seeking perfect interpretations but being liberated by its impossibility (110–1). This impossibility is not just a practical limitation, but also at times an ethical one. Regarding notions of cultural opacity and transparency, seminal poets and scholars Édouard Glissant (see ‘Poetics of Relation’) and Fred Moten (see ‘Black and Blur’), remind us in their influential texts that culture does not need to be completely understood or articulated—made transparent—to still be respected, engaged with, or legitimised by those outside of them (for further discussion, refer to See & Amorim 59–60). Translation between Modalities Studio practice innately demands moving between different modalities of expression, representation, and knowledge as ideas are interrogated through the artist’s praxis of theory and practice. Thinking through materials in this way, therefore, also demands improvising connections between the unevenness or non-equivalence of these modalities. Intermodality is often encountered when artists must work with both the tacit or embodied knowledge embedded in materials and processes and that of written and spoken language; this process is formalised further through exegetical writing, didactic labels, and artist talks. Influential art theorist Barbara Bolt describes this as the “double articulation” of practice that is central to practice-led research (29). Theorist Jillian Hamilton highlights the tension that emerges when artist-researchers must rationalise the subjective nature of studio practice—describing “a push and pull upon meaning and interpretation; between the analytical and the experiential” (3). Tension notwithstanding, translating ideas between different modes of thinking and making is valuable to facilitate critical insights and reflections; however, the materiality and experience embedded in artefacts can demand considerable improvisation to bridge between the logic and aesthetics of spoken and written language, and vice versa. The notion of translation is also relevant to visual arts’ inherent interdisciplinarity; this is not interdisciplinarity in terms of an artist and scientist co-exploring a problem via the space between their disciplinary perspectives. Rather, theorist and artist Mieke Bal argues that all cultural artefacts are inherently interdisciplinary and cannot “be confined to categories such as ‘painting,’ ‘sculpture,’ or ‘film,’ [as] the awareness has grown that not only now but always, many artworks fit uneasily in the disciplinary categories designed for their study” (2). Bal outlines her argument while analysing Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s 2008 video work, ‘WHERE IS WHERE?’, as she identifies at least seven disciplines, including history, cinema, theatre, politics, language, literature, and philosophy. Bal makes a clear distinction between of and as, stating that Ahtila’s artwork is of the cinematic and of the philosophical—in sharp contrast to cinema as philosophical—as "to ‘give’ philosophical status to cinema is different from explaining cinema philosophically” (11). Bal adds that just as this interdisciplinarity is inevitable, it is equally impossible to make full use of the entire paradigms and methodological packages of these disciplines. Nor is it possible for any individual to be knowledgeable in the canonical texts whose importance these disciplines tend to take for granted. This confronts us with the primary challenge interdisciplinarity poses. (3–4) Disciplines are not required to (nor can) be on ‘equal footing’, nor are their connections “harmonious and blending” (Bal 5). Approaching the creation and interpretation of artworks from Bal’s perspective is not to divide disciplinary integrations into separate studies, but to explore the connections that form between disciplines. For me, integrations took the form of adopting and adapting (a.k.a. translating) videogame tropes into my approach to painting (for a more in-depth discussion, refer to See 253–4). A Practice-Led Approach Embracing translation as a catalyst to disrupt and expand my approaches to painting was undertaken within a practice-led research (PLR) methodology. In PLR, creative practice is the animating force behind scholarly inquiry as insights emerge through the studio materials and methods familiar to the researcher (Bolt 28–9). Data takes the form of studio artefacts and experiences, which are contextualised, interpreted, and theorised through exegetical writing. My data predominantly constitutes painting and drawing, along with studio documentation through journalling, photography, and videography; insights emerge through critical analysis and reflection on data in dialogue with relevant creative and cultural theory. Bolt asserts that when thinking through materials, knowledge forms through the rigorous and responsive “handling [of] materials in practice” (29) in dialogue with the broader contexts and theories that inform how that practice is performed. Drawing on Bolt, theorist Katve-Kaisa Kontturi posits how art emerges from a “complex ecology of participation” (21) from which artists follow their more-than-human collaborators. Kontturi (2018) uses more-than-human to describe the material, conceptual, and temporal qualities that artists activate through practice. To pursue new ways of thinking and making, artists must first locate themselves within the ecology from which they participate. One such way is by acknowledging the key cultural texts and artefacts that have informed their practice, especially those beyond the silo of our primary disciplines. For me, this meant acknowledging how influential videogames are to my approach to painting. PLR has an inherently “outward-looking attitude” (Gray and Malins 21) that encourages the incorporation of other research methods, theories and paradigms. It is this attitude that both revealed videogames as an influence, and facilitated its exploratory integration into painting. Videogames into Painting Curator and author Anthony Bond once commented how a generation of Australian artists learned to paint from magazines and books; situated far from the galleries of Europe and North America, printed media were their window to their Western contemporaries and traditional canons, but at the same time translated the material qualities of these cultural artefacts into flat photographic reproduction. If these artists experienced cultural artefacts through books and magazines, then I did so through digital, interactive media. Born 3 years after Bond’s 1987 comments, my formative years were not spent in art galleries but playing videogames. Once thought to be a frivolous pastime that sat outside of my creative practice, this medium was my first meaningful experience with cultural texts and artefacts; more specifically, playing videogames was my first deep engagement with how a creative medium might approach visual storytelling. Acknowledging that videogames are influenced by preceding traditions of painting (see Szymański; Hemraj), my art education was somewhat in reverse, pausing my first career as an industrial and digital designer—which did involve some novice attempts at game development—to attend art school in my mid-twenties. As videogames implicitly draw on long-established pictorial conventions from the history of painting, my reincorporation of videogames into my paintings illustrates a cycle of cross-medial translation. With reference to Bal’s conception of interdisciplinary, my practice is both of the painterly and of the ludological; however, these disciplines are not on equal footing as connections between them are explored through a painting-led dialogue. As such, attempts were made to translate videogame tropes and storytelling devices into painting, not the other way around. My initial approach to painting—before attempting such translations—was typified by my interest in exploring notions of duality through fictional landscapes (fig. 1). I had recently returned from China and was inspired by Ming Dynasty painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509), specifically his c. 1467 scroll painting Lofty Mount Lu that dwarfs tiny figures within grand, awe-inspiring natural surroundings. Fig. 1: Twins (Herod), oil on board, 61cm x 92cm. Harrison Waed See, 2019. As both painting and videogames are arguably visual media, there were many moments of harmony—exploring how a painting could adopt videogame storytelling and aesthetic conventions. However, it is the potential for discordance between these two media that led to the most novelty. More conceptual integrations, such as player agency, choice, and replayability—the ability to replay a game segment to explore different outcomes—required more improvisation to bridge. It is naïve to suggest that these two concepts are absent from painting: from a Deleuzian perspective, this medium can indeed affect visual, emotional, or conceptual interaction with its audience that can undeniably create an immersive experience (see Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties; and Difference and Repetition). In terms of replayability, the interpretation of any cultural text (paintings included) is never fixed as it can be revisited/reiterated by audiences of different sociotemporalities to produce alternative readings (Bakhtin 280–5). The potential for alternative readings, however, is still distinct from how a videogame explicitly presents audiences with alternative experiences as the result of different in-game choices. Emulating the potential to feature alternative choices-cum-outcomes in painting meant emphasising the plurality of the storytelling embedded within my landscapes. I moved away from any single, overarching narrative and started layering multiple, at times contradicting, micronarratives. Each micronarrative inferred an alternative replay of the same landscape. Instead of rendering the concept of ‘alternative choice’ as a visual metaphor, I found it more engaging to render potential outcomes of those alternative choices as to let the audience fill in the gaps. For example, rather than rendering clichéd visual metaphors like a forked path or an array of signposts, I layer (or palimpsest) the same figure but wearing different equipment or clothing—or the same scene but featuring different flora or infrastructure—to prompt an imagining or hypothesising about the cause of these changes. To remain within the scope of this paper, I briefly focus on two videogame tropes that I translated into painting: ‘HUD elements’ and ‘aggregate figures’. HUD Elements I found that integrating non-diegetic elements utilised in videogame heads-up-displays (HUDs) was a particularly useful and often subtle means of embedding plurality into my paintings. A HUD overlay is part of videogames’ broader user interface (UI) that offers information to a player about the in-game mechanics of characters and environments that would otherwise be unseen. Common HUD elements include, but are not limited to: health bars, minimaps, status icons, countdown timers, ammunition counters, equipment slots, subtitles or dialogue, score points, or navigation markers. I first began experimenting with how to translate these elements into paintings by dissolving this diegetic/non-diegetic binary, and having figures engage with health bars or minimaps as part of the landscape. However, I found the most potential for plurality when keeping this binary intact, and using HUD elements to encourage extensions, reinterpretations, and in some cases contradictions about what might otherwise be taken for granted in a painting. Examples include attributing status icons, health bars, or equipment slots to figures or objects to reveal things not otherwise represented in the scene (figs. 2 and 3). Fig. 2: Detail of Clear Skies (after Encounters with Nisbet, Brooks-Crew, Gelmi, Yussof Mah and Lau). Oil on canvas, 152.5cm x 91.5cm. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Fig. 3: Detail of Excavation (after Encounters with Mah, Nisbet and Brooks-Crew). Oil on canvas, 152.5cm x 91.5cm. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Minimaps were also used to allude that which is beyond the frame or perspective of the painting. For example, figs. 4 and 5 show a minimap in the corner of the painting that plots the streets in front of the painting’s central character, representing them from a birds-eye view to mark potential opportunities or dangers a character (and a viewer) cannot observe from looking at the main, diegetic composition of the painting. Fig. 4: Campfire Valley. Oil on board, 184cm x 205.5cm (multiple panels). Harrison Waed See, 2021. Fig. 5: Detail of Campfire Valley showing minimap. It was by exploring HUD elements that I began to experiment with integrating dialogue portraits (or character portraits). Although not strictly a HUD element, dialogue portraits typically appear in videogames next to dialogue text and feature a close-up view of a character as they speak (see Final Fantasy III, 1990). Still used as a trope in contemporary videogames to great effect (see Disco Elysium, 2019), these portraits were used in older videogames to deal with the graphical limitations of pixels—allowing a higher-fidelity rendition of faces and facial expressions that were impossible to show in the much smaller and therefore fewer pixels of a diegetic videogame character. Translating dialogue portraits into paintings meant including close-up details of something or someone too small in the painting to convey otherwise. Like my use of HUD elements, details in these portraits often encourage extensions, reinterpretations, and contradictions of who or what they are attributed to. A recent and subtle example of this integration can be seen in fig. 6, a work-in-progress that emphasises the stare of a small bird otherwise unassumingly perched on a branch. Fig. 6: The Watchers. Oil on board, 50.5cm x 40.5cm. Harrison Waed See, 2025. Aggregate Figures Observing the abrupt difference between the fidelity and aesthetics of in-game characters and their respective dialogue portraits inspired my exploration of what I term ‘aggregate figures’. This approach to figuration was inspired by witnessing how videogames evolved from pixel sprites to fully rendered three-dimensional models, and back again. Being born in 1990, I observed firsthand how developers for 8-bit and 16-bit consoles approached graphical limitations. While still very well-considered, these videogames lacked the pixel-counts required to achieve realism for in-game characters, hence the need for dialogue portraits; instead, representations were symbolic rather than naturalistic. However, a character’s appearance was fragmented across a range of visual languages: beyond in-game pixel sprites, the same character was rendered differently (by different artists) across a videogame’s cover art, promotional media, and toys, as well as in the game during cinematic cutscenes. Similarly, the advent of three-dimensional games on 32-bit consoles had its own sets of limitations. Developers opted to use alternative character models of varying fidelities for different parts of a game. For example, the character ‘Cloud Strife’ (see Final Fantasy VII, 1997), appears significantly different during combat, exploration, and cutscenes. What inspired me the most was the dialogue that forms between a character’s alternative renditions, often aesthetically mismatched with incompatible details, as well as how a character is reiterated between naturalistic and symbolic while still remaining both canonical and recognisable. The notion of aggregate figures is explored in my paintings by fragmenting the same figures across a diverse range of forms—both within the same painting and across a series (fig. 7). I often change small details so that characters have to be pieced together across multiple, incomplete (and incompatible) renditions. As I explored this integration further, I observed how videogame aesthetics are not strictly linear: for example, how the stylistic nature of pixel sprites is extended through more sophisticated animations and higher pixel counts (see Hyper Light Drifter, 2016), or the uncanniness of low-polygon models is intentionally utilised to affect unease (see Paratopic, 2018). I also observed how the fidelity of videogame characters increased across sequels, remasters, or remakes (see Final Fantasy VII: Remake, 2020)—or conversely, how fidelity regressed through demakes (see Bloodborne PSX, 2022). If a videogame character’s aesthetic is unresolved, and not tied to its chronology, then my painted figures do not need to be tied to their context. In other words, I moved away from the convention of increased scale, contrast, chroma, and detail typically used to emphasise a foreground figure, and the inverse used to deemphasise a figure in the background. Taking this a step further, I swapped typically naturalistic figures for typically symbolic icons, and vice versa (fig. 8); all of which created new opportunities to explore a pluralistic approach to painted storytelling. Fig. 7: Details of blue adventurer from series of paintings Far-Away Island. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Fig. 8: Details of blue adventurer next to icon from series of paintings Far-Away Island. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Shifting Conceptions As I continue to translate videogame tropes, specifically, the notion of replayability, I experimented with prints in 2024 (fig. 9), creating a digital composite image from photographs of a series of paintings; together, these prints form a triptych with each featuring minor variations (fig. 10). In 2025, I am exploring variations in painted triptychs that I conceive as a pluralism of replays of the same gameworld marked by alternative choices, and thus alternative outcomes. In this way, the experience of painting is conceived as playing through the potentialities within a landscape, while compositions are conceived as screenshots of a paused videogame waiting to be resumed. For me, embracing the ‘uneven fit’ between painting and videogames continues to prompt improvisation in the studio, and by outlining my experiences, I encourage others to explore their own studio translations. Fig. 9: Valley of Coasts and Beasts. Digital image. Harrison Waed See, 2024. Fig. 10: Valley of Coasts and Beasts. Fabric ink, silk screen print, and archival digital print on synthetic fibre (380 gsm), 138cm, x 103cm (each). Harrison Waed See, 2024–2025. References Ahtila, Eija-Liisa. WHERE IS WHERE? [MISSÄ ON MISSÄ?] Video installation, 6-channel projected High Definition installation with 8-channel sound; 53 min. 43 sec. France, Jeu de Paume, 2008. . Bal, Mieke. “Mektoub: When Art Meets History, Philosophy, and Linguistics.” Case Studies in Interdisciplinary Research, eds. Allen F Repko et al. Sage, 2013. 91–122. . Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. ‌‌Bhabha, Homi K. “Interview with Homi Bhabha: The Third Space.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, by Johnathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 207–21. Bloodborne PSX. Dir. b0tster (Lilith Walther) and Corwyn Prichard. Videogame, Windows. LWMedia. Bolt, Barbara. “The Magic Is in the Handling.” Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry. 2nd ed. Eds. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt I.B. Tauris, 2010. 28–34. Bond, Anthony. “Introduction.” The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta, eds. Anthony Bond and Victoria Lynn. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1987. 4–7. . ‌Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W Smith. London: Continuum, 1981. ———. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press, 1984. ———. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Disco Elysium. Dir. Robert Kurvitz. Videogame, Windows. ZA/UM, 2019. Emerson, Caryl. “Keeping the Self Intact during the Culture Wars: A Centennial Essay for Mikhail Bakhtin.” New Literary History 27.1 (1996): 107–26. Final Fantasy III. Dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi. Videogame, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Square, 1990. Final Fantasy VII. Dir. Yoshinori Kitase. Videogame, Sony Playstation. Square, 1990. Final Fantasy VII: Remake. Dir. Tetsuya Nomura, Naoki Hamaguchi, and Motomu Toriyama. Videogame, Sony Playstation 4. Square, 2020. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. U of Michigan P, 1997. . ‌Gray, Carol, and Julian Malins. Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Ashgate, 2004. Hyper Light Drifter. Dir. Alx Preston, Beau Blyth, Teddy Dief, and Casey Hunt. Videogame, Windows. Heart-Machine, 2016. Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa. Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration. Open Humanities Press, 2018. . Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Duke UP, 2017. . ‌Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Cultural Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Void.” Translation Studies 4.1 (2011): 1–20. . Paratopic. Dir. Jessica Harvey. Videogame, Windows. Arbitrary Metric, 2018. Hemraj, Shaif. “Defining Art Styles in Games and Their Influence on Creative Expression.” Press Start 10.1 (2024). . See, Harrison Waed. Far-Away Island. Exhibition. Western Australia: Spectrum Project Space (ECU Galleries), 2022. See, Harrison Waed. "Analogising Art Practice as Gameplay: A Dialogic Integration of Videogames as a Pluralistic Approach to Painting." Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal 10.1 (2026): 74–105. . See, Harrison Waed, and Patricia Amorim. "Two Approaches to Cross-Cultural Exchange through Shared Arts Practice." Journal of Arts & Communities 16.1 (2026): 57–81. . Shen Zhou [沈周]. 廬山高 [Lofty Mount Lu]. Ink and colours on paper scroll; 193.8cm x 98.1cm. Taiwan: Taipei Palace Museum, c. 1467. . Szymański, Michał. “Computer Games in Art History. Traditional Architecture and Painting Presented in Virtual Reality.” E-Methodology 5.5 (2019): 84–9. .

Designing marketing for Western Australia, I source photos of red earth, select Pantone colours from my digital palette and manipulate Beziér curves to create beautiful visuals. My hands are confined to keyboard and mouse, fingertips clicking smooth plastic keys, crafting perfect representations of Country I’ve never walked on. This process of design represents places through pixel and vector rather than experiencing the crunch of dry earth underfoot, the smell of eucalyptus after rain, or the feeling of wet soil sticking to your skin. This experience reflects broader patterns across design education. In studios across Western Australia, students navigate user interfaces to develop fluency with digital design tools. These experiences build digital literacies essential for contemporary practice that are heavily emphasised in Australian Curriculum (ACARA), yet they only represent one dimension of design knowledge. Material experiences, on the other hand, offer irreplaceable ways of knowing and sensing the world. When I work Clay with Noongar Country, my hands press firmly into earth, feeling the resistance, moisture, and responsiveness of matter that connects me directly to this place. Current secondary design education often overlooks this embodied dimension of material experience, moving quickly from concept to digital visualisation without developing the sensory knowledge that emerges from direct material engagement. This gap matters, as human-caused ecological decline is accelerating (United Nations) and education needs to cultivate designers capable of sensing and responding to a changing climate. Pedagogy that prioritises digital tools that simulate rather than engage with the world risks further distancing young people from natural worlds, while material experiences reconnect humans and environments and support development of much needed ecological awareness. By situating learning within specific places and thinking with materials and the complex stories they carry, education can nurture greater capacity for noticing and living well with damaged landscapes (Tsing). This article emerges from creative research into relational design pedagogy, situated in Boorloo (Perth) in the southwest corner of Western Australia. Drawing from posthuman theories, design is positioned within complex interconnected networks of humans, materials, environments, ideas, and more-than-human actors (Barad; Latour). To engage with these relationships, a practice-led methodology guides my working with Clay to design and prototype vessels for improving water retention in soils. This research examines how deeper understandings of materials embodied in practice transform people-place relations and can inform learning to design sustainable futures. Central to this research is examining how relations of care and responsibility emerge through collaborations with Clay and Country. Australian landscape is Aboriginal and storied, and Boorloo (Perth) carries complex histories of Noongar knowledge and colonial disruption, alongside ecological degradation. Situating my design practice here involves weaving together the layered Stories of Clay that unfold in these unceded lands of the Noongar nations. This highlights Clay bodies as living archives that can teach how to sense moisture, temperature, and seasonal changes that are shifting with ecological imbalance. In this region, the warming climate has triggered intense bushfires and record-breaking dry spells where mature trees are dying off en masse, due to lack of soil moisture (Fowler and Ruthrof). Endemic species are becoming extinct at alarming rates (IUCN; TERN Australia), and rainfall is declining here faster than anywhere else in Australia (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology 8). Designers cannot ignore this accelerating deterioration, and Design Education is called upon to transform human-centred pedagogy with learning experiences that cultivate relations of repair and regeneration. Developing relational design pedagogy starts with recognising that Indigenous cultures have conceptualised the world in relational ways for a very long time (Escobar; Mignolo). In Boorloo (Perth) this means learning from the traditional owners here, the Wadjuk Noongar peoples, and their ongoing connection to Country. First Nations in Australia have experienced genocide, dispossession, and systematic oppression under settler colonialism (Ryan et al.; Yokai). Decolonial approaches are essential for honouring the Indigenous wisdoms that endure in Western Australia. Noongar spirituality embodies reciprocal relationships with Country, reflected in stories of the Waagal, the creation serpent, who maintains all fresh water sources and remains present throughout landscapes (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council). This worldview regards Country as living kin, teaching that human wellbeing and the health of Country are inseparable (Wooltorton et al.). Contemporary design education can respectfully learn from these perspectives and nurture similar attentiveness through situated learning with materials and environments. Ecological awareness emerges through learning experiences in collaboration with materials like Clay, whose stories reveal entangled histories and potential futures across time and place. The Story of Clay in Western Australia The Story of Clay in Western Australia is filled with complex histories spanning distinct periods and changing worldviews. Following these stories reveals geological, cultural, ecological, and spiritual threads that weave together material-relational understandings. One significant strand involves Clay’s central role in the production of building and construction materials. Red bricks produced from Clays in Boorloo (Perth) feature in architecture styles that evolved from the Federation era in 1901 (Apperly, Irving, and Reynolds). In the late nineteenth century, colonial settlers discovered Clay deposits along Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River), the river that cuts through the city, and significant brickworks were established on lands with which Noongar people had maintained relationships for millennia. Clay and ochre have always been important to Wadjuk Noongar people, with physical, spiritual, social, and ceremonial uses for Clays in this region (Museum of Perth par. 2). This period represents relations with Clay as a raw material that shapes built environments, yet cannot be separated from the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Country. Students need to understand that materials carry these histories of extraction, displacement and ecological impact, that designers cannot ignore. Another essential thread in this narrative is how Clay bodies have been shaped by the geography where this story unfolds. Most of Boorloo (Perth) is built on the Swan Coastal Plain, where flat expanses of sandy soils stretch westwards to Gabee Warden Karanup (Indian Ocean). Along the entire eastern horizon, the granite ridge and steep hills of KattaMorda (Darling Range) rise abruptly, forming a constant presence overlooking the city and running parallel to the coast for over 320 km. This escarpment marks the edge of Yilgarn Craton, an ancient continental bedrock where the earth holds stories spanning 4 billion years. Important to this story is how this unique landscape creates conditions for water to weather granite over long periods of time and deposit minerals downstream to form the distinctive terracotta Clays in the Swan Valley region (fig. 1). Designing with these Clay bodies is engaging with a material shaped by this convergence of deep geological time and active water systems. Fig. 1: KattaMorda (Darling Range) marks the edge of Yilgarn Craton, seen as the brown area on the right in this satellite image taken during the 2021 Copernicus Satellite Mission 2. Adapted from European Space Agency. Water shapes both the Clay deposits in Boorloo (Perth) and human relationships to this place, connecting Noongar ways of living with colonial settlement patterns along the same river systems. Rivers are rich sites for understanding Clay and offer multiple dimensions of place as geographic features, sites of cultural significance, spaces for embodied learning, and holders of stories (Somerville). Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) is an animating force in Boorloo (Perth), nourishing wetland habitats and sustaining life in this uniquely biodiverse region (Hopper and Gioia). Waters flow through inland areas, then emerge from KattaMorda (Darling Range), where they slow and form the rich soils of the Swan Valley. This fertile region has sustained Indigenous cultures for millennia and later became Western Australia’s oldest wine region and a major source of agricultural produce and construction Clay. It’s here, 35 km northeast of Boorloo (Perth), where waterways converge and we meet the main character in this story, a Clay body referred to as Walyunga Clay (fig. 2). Fig. 2: Walyunga Clay’s distinctive terracotta-red colour comes from deep weathering of the Archaean rock of KattaMorda (Darling Scarp) (Anand and Paine). Photographs by author. Collaborating with Walyunga Clay brings awareness of the tensions in Noongar Country from competing interests of mining, industry, tourism, environmental activism, and Indigenous rights. This Clay body emerges on the edges of Walyunga National Park, a protected area in the Swan Valley, not far from Walyunga Pool, a Wadjuk Noongar meeting place and campground (Hughes-Hallett 66). This area is named for Walyunga or Wayloo, the Noongar name for a small kangaroo, or place of woylie, referring to the brush-tailed bettong (Bettongia penicillata) once endemic here, but now critically endangered (WA Museum). This popular recreational area also hosts the Avon Descent, an annual 2-day white-water event that brings many visitors to the park. Less than a kilometre away, Clay is extracted to manufacture bricks, tiles, and pavers for building and construction. This area was also devastated in 2021 by a wild bushfire that burned for six days, destroying 10,900 hectares, 86 houses, and causing immeasurable impact on animal kin and wildlife communities. An evolving relationship with Walyunga Country provides the primary setting for this story that investigates place-responsive design, and establishes the foundation for the next chapter of this story. Practices for Sensing Walyunga Thinking with Walyunga Clay emerges through this Story of Clay and situated practices that engage slowing down, noticing, and sensing with Walyunga Country. These methods are influenced by Australian Indigenous concepts of deep listening that vary in different landscapes throughout Australia (Yunkaporta). In the southwest of Western Australia this is explained by Noongar Elder Noel Nannup as dwoort, which involves listening to place over extended periods to develop awareness of seasonal patterns. Learning with Walyunga Country since 2021 has deepened my love for this place, but also attuned my senses to the slow material rhythms here. Sustained presence with Walyunga Country develops my capacity for sensing how subtle seasonal changes affect soil conditions, but also grows my understanding of how materials and places affect and teach humans. Each visit with Walyunga starts with watercolour painting to focus my mind and to pay attention to the changing colours of the season. This activity is used in Visual Arts Education to teach tacit knowledge (Polanyi) through sustained observation and for developing perceptual skills (Edwards). This emphasis on noticing scaffolds learning to see what is actually in front of you, rather than relying on symbolic, preconceived, or imagined ideas. When sensing with Walyunga, I mix the colours of each season, not what I imagine a painting of this place should look like. Important in this activity is not the actual painting itself, but rather how this method encourages slowing down and becoming more attuned. Rather than creating pictorial representations through distanced observation, similar to digital design methods, in this sensing activity, paints are mixed and applied in repeating patterns of brushstrokes. The width and length of each stroke varies between visits, determined by the material conditions such as the brush dimensions, water quality, paper absorbency, wind, rain, temperature, light, and shadows. During the Noongar season of Djeran (Autumn), water spills on the paper and I pause and notice the waters of Gogulyar Bilya (Avon River) flowing with Wooroloo Brook (fig. 3). A visit with Djilba (Spring), and the marks on the paper transform into shadows of tiny flying insects that hover above, then four weeks later in Kambarang (second Spring) Walyunga is exploding with the bright colours of Paterson’s curse, a declared weed in local farming areas (fig. 4). It is this sustained looking and sensing with Walyunga Country that reveals ecological relationships that remain invisible in screen-based design education. Fig. 3: In April, the season of Djeran (Autumn) brings rain to fill the pools. Photographs by author. Fig. 4: In October, the season of Kambarang (second Spring) brings warmer weather, wildflowers, and weeds. Photographs by author. The process of sensing materials and places with slow careful attention differs from learning to design with semiotics and symbolic representation, as this relies on culturally learned interpretations, rather than learning from direct experience. When design education heavily emphasises semiotic analysis, conceptual thinking about meanings often overshadows embodied knowledge of how materials respond. This leaves designers fluent in meaning-making and effective communicators of messages to audiences, but disconnected from physical reality. These skills are useful for teaching marketing design with an economic purpose, but they no longer serve a world in climate crisis, where reciprocal relations are urgently needed for teaching design for repair and regeneration. In this context, developing pedagogies of listening becomes essential for sensing climate and understanding what materials like Clay can teach about ecological relationships. Making with Walyunga Clay and Country Making with Walyunga Clay emerges through sensing practices and making materials for designing functional vessels. Following the Story of Clay in Western Australia led me to a local brick manufacturer, Midland Brick, who work with Clay bodies in the Swan Valley region. I gathered a range of Clay soils from their Walyunga/Bullsbrook North site to respectfully work with existing disturbance and minimise impact on fragile ecosystems, whilst still engaging with Noongar Country. Making with Walyunga Clay involves a process of slaking, where dried earth is mixed with water to form a Clay that can be sculpted into vessels. These situated relational design practices help me better understand the material qualities of Walyunga Clay, whilst building relations of care and reciprocity with Noongar Country. Relational design practices require extended temporal engagement with the changing states of Clay. During the slaking process, dried soils are added to water to awaken their plasticity, then the mixture is left to settle overnight so the Clay suspension can separate (fig. 5). Excess water is then carefully removed, and the mixture is filtered through fabric to release water for another two days. When the Clay achieves the perfect workability for shaping into forms, I start rolling the material into balls then engage an ancient coiling technique found across cultures worldwide. The Clay that emerged was grainy and textural compared to commercially bought materials, as it was shaped by hand-making and the other materials this Clay has gathered over time. This challenges the pursuit of refined perfect materials for human use, instead revealing the richness of engaging with interdependent more-than-human communities. Yet this slaking process was only the beginning of an even more intimate temporal relationship with Walyunga Clay. Fig. 5: Slaking soils and hand-building Walyunga Clay vessels with Noongar Country. Photographs by author. The hand-building process that followed demanded even deeper temporal commitment. Each vessel required daily monitoring and checking of moisture levels, adjusting covers and positioning according to climatic conditions, where I learn to respond to Clay’s pace of drying over days and sometimes weeks. This intimate attention to the changing needs of materials contrasts sharply with conventional learning in Western Australian secondary schools, where students work with manufactured Clays for short periods and teachers are left to manage the crucial drying process. This misses the opportunity for experiencing the leatherhard stage, that perfect moment when Clay has dried enough to be firm and rigid but is still pliable and can be smoothed, polished and joined. At this stage the vessel becomes incredibly responsive, allowing sgraffitto techniques and cutting of precise holes in walls without compromising structural integrity. Walyunga Clay’s creamy malleability at leatherhard stage reveals possibilities impossible at any other moisture level. Practices of following (Kontturi) were developed through this patient attention to material transformations. Reciprocal relationships emerged where Walyunga Clay became teacher and collaborator, nurturing embodied knowledge through relations of care. This engagement is influenced by Indigenous understandings of time and Haraway’s notion of a thick present (1), where the storied histories embedded in Clay continue to shape present moments, while opening future possibilities. Walyunga Clay demonstrates agency by shrinking and cracking when drying too fast, becoming more plastic when wet, and actively repelling conventional joining techniques. Standard score and slip methods fail because this Clay body resists water mixtures, requiring instead the physical merging of parts with pressing and blending until they become unified. Without this intimate integration, joints separate during drying, revealing Clay’s resistance. Working with Walyunga Clay reveals behaviours such as these that are impossible to understand through observation alone. The iron-rich composition of Walyunga Clay was formed over geological time and carries stories of ancient water flows and seasonal flooding that shaped this landscape. This taught me about the intimate relationship between Clay and water cycles, showing how material properties remain inseparable from climatic conditions across multiple timescales. Walyunga Clay’s selective absorption patterns and temperamental drying behaviours demand patient attention and responsive design choices. This led me to design compact vessels with solid walls that worked with rather than against these material agencies. Such temporally-layered engagement demonstrates pedagogical approaches are needed to attune students with specific places and materials with learning that embodies climate relationships essential for regenerative design. Relational Design Pedagogy with Noongar Country Situating design practice through place-based material experiences can transform design education from screen-based digital manipulation to embodied environmental literacy. Working with Walyunga Clay reveals how materials continue to shape present understandings whilst creating future possibilities and developing climate awareness, impossible to achieve through digital learning alone. Sensing practices of watercolour painting with Noongar Country and deeper material engagement foster intimate relationships where materials guide and inform the learning process. This transforms conceptual knowledge into embodied understanding of how climate affects matter and how matter responds across multiple timescales. Following the Story of Clay in Western Australia demonstrates how situating design within multi-layered narratives develops relational thinking with Noongar Country. This approach reveals layered histories, spanning Indigenous knowledge systems, colonial extraction, and ecological relationships, while cultivating the temporal awareness essential for climate-responsive practice. Such situated learning moves beyond conventional sustainability approaches and cradle-to-cradle design methods (McDonough and Braungart) to develop forms of environmental literacy that emerge only through direct and sustained engagement with place. Rather than emphasising rapid iteration and digital fluency, this pedagogical approach enables students to read material behaviours as climate indicators, developing the skills required for addressing ecological challenges through design. The contrast between designing perfect digital representations of Country I’ve never walked with and feeling deep time and material agency through my hands pressed into Walyunga Clay reveals what design education urgently needs. Digital technologies have expanded creative possibilities, but situated engagement with materials remains an irreplaceable form of experiential knowledge. As climate challenges intensify, design pedagogy must cultivate designers capable of sensing environmental relationships through material experiences with place, rather than relying on digital technologies. Situating design practice offers pathways for this transformation, developing the relational understanding necessary for regenerative design futures centred on caring with Country. References ACARA. "Digital Literacy in the New Australian Curriculum." Australian Curriculum (2026). . Anand, Ravinder Raj, and Mark Paine. "Regolith Geology of the Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia: Implications for Exploration." Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 49.1 (2002): 3–162. . Apperly, Richard, Robert Irving, and Peter L. Reynolds. A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present. 3rd ed. Angus & Robertson, 1994. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology. State of the Climate 2024. CSIRO, 2024. . Edwards, Betty. The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 2nd ed. Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1999. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke UP, 2018. European Space Agency. “Earth from Space: Perth, Australia.” 2021. . Fowler, William, and Katinka Ruthrof. "The 2024 Vegetation Die-Off in the Southwest." Bushland News 130 (2024): 3–5. . Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Hopper, Stephen D., and Paul Gioia. "The Southwest Australian Floristic Region: Evolution and Conservation of a Global Hot Spot of Biodiversity." Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 35.1 (2004): 623–50. Hughes‐Hallett, Debra. Indigenous History of the Swan and Canning Rivers. Swan River Trust, 2010. . IUCN. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. 2026. . Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa. Ways of Following. Open Humanities Press, 2018. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press, 2002. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke UP, 2011. Museum of Perth. "Dyeedyallalup." . Nannup, Noel. "Ni! Means Listen: Uncle Noel Nannup." Ngaluk Waangkiny: Stories of Resilience, ed. Phil Walleystack. Ep. 8. Community Arts Network, City of Perth, and Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2022. . Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. 2nd ed. U of Chicago P, 2009. Ryan, Lyndall, et al. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930. University of Newcastle, 2024. . Somerville, Margaret. Water in a Dry Land: Place-Learning through Art and Story. Routledge, 2013. South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council. "Spirituality.” Kaartdijin Noongar – Noongar Knowledge, 2023. . TERN Australia. Australia’s Threatened Species Index – 2025 Update. . Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025. 2025. . WA Museum. "Woylie." 2023. . Wooltorton, Sandra, et al. "Sharing a Place-Based Indigenous Methodology and Learnings." Environmental Education Research 26.7 (2020): 917–34. YOKAI Healing Our Spirit (West Australian Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation) and Bringing Them Home, WA Inc., producers. Genocide in the Wildflower State. Dir. Frank Rijavec. Ronin Films, 2024. Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. The Text Publishing Company, 2023.

Introduction Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has become one of the defining cultural technologies of the 2020s, transforming not only how content is produced but also how creativity itself is imagined. From text generation to image synthesis, GenAI blurs distinctions between professional and amateur practice, art and automation, originality and imitation. These shifts reach far beyond the studio or agency: they unsettle cultural hierarchies, redistribute expertise, and reconfigure what it means to author or evaluate creative work with scholars and practitioners highlighting both GenAI’s disruptive and enabling potential (Amankwah-Amoah et al.; Coffin; Hartmann et al.; Matthews et al.). As such, GenAI sits squarely at the intersection of technology and culture, making it vital to examine how creative practitioners experience and negotiate its affordances. These questions mirror broader cultural discussions about automation, expertise, aesthetics, and creativity in digital media, situating our research within contemporary debates about creativity in an algorithmic age. This article explores those negotiations through a collaborative autoethnography (Chang) in which creative professionals who are also educators worked with GenAI tools to develop an advertising campaign from concept to final artefact. By grounding our analysis in lived experience, we examine not only what GenAI can produce, but how it alters the creative process. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity and Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital, we situate our reflections within a wider theoretical conversation about expertise, taste, and technological mediation. These frameworks allow us to interrogate how GenAI participation affects the balance between human judgment and machine generation or between creative flow and algorithmic patterning. In doing so, we contribute to broader debates on the cultural implications of GenAI by identifying how expert practitioners sustain, redefine, and sometimes resist aesthetic standards in an era of algorithmic co-creation. The Positive Case for GenAI in Creative Practice The rapid rise of GenAI has intensified debates about its role in creative practice, particularly in creative industries where efficiency, cost-saving, and innovation are central (Cui et al.; Hartmann et al.; Matthews et al.). The issue is no longer simply whether GenAI is useful but how it reshapes the very conditions of creativity. By automating routine tasks, the technology frees practitioners to focus on more imaginative and rewarding work. As Amankwah-Amoah et al. highlight, GenAI’s transformative potential can produce “compelling” content without the burden of extensive “manual research and editing” (2), saving creative professionals time and energy that can be repurposed to more invigorating and empowering activities. Yet, as Csikszentmihalyi’s model suggests, creativity emerges from the dynamic interaction between domain (cultural knowledge), field (gatekeepers and experts), and individual (the creator). When GenAI intervenes in this system, it can rebalance these forces, enabling rapid idea generation but also introducing algorithmic biases that affect the domain of possible outcomes (Atkinson and Baker), or expectations that one can demand more for less (Matthews et al.). This theoretical perspective stresses that what feels like creative freedom can also be a reconfiguration of control. In the debates supporting GenAI, Hettrich et al. suggest that the technology can challenge human creators to think beyond the obvious by offering alternative directions that spark the creative imagination in ways they might not reach alone. Its adoption, then, is not merely a matter of convenience but a means of expanding creative possibility. What debates advocating for GenAI use emphasise is the fact that its use does not sideline the human creator. Instead, GenAI reshapes their role: Osadchaya et al. underline its function as collaborator and catalyst, enabling creatives to overcome the ‘tyranny of the blank page’, while Cui et al. highlight how it sparks novel ideas and accelerates responses to creative briefs. These perspectives make clear that GenAI should not be viewed as a competitor to human creativity but as a partner that expands its possibilities, challenging practitioners to reimagine both the process and the product of creative work. From a systems perspective, these collaborations demonstrate how GenAI alters what Csikszentmihalyi describes as a flow state: the absorption and momentum characteristic of deep creative engagement by accelerating iteration cycles and reframing what counts as exploration. Furthermore, audiences are also becoming less apprehensive about AI-generated content, with some studies showing they find AI images equally persuasive, especially in areas such as advertising and brand communication (Hartmann et al.). This suggests that combining GenAI with human expertise can enhance both the creative potential of the work and its acceptance by audiences. The Negative Case for GenAI in Creative Practice Despite GenAI’s growing value in creative processes, anxieties remain that it could displace professionals and dilute the aesthetic and quality standards traditionally associated with creative work that is exclusively human-made (Amankwah-Amoah et al.; Coffin). Scholars such as Runco contend that GenAI produces only “pseudo-creativity” (1), outputs that may appear effective but lack the contextual grounding and cultural depth of human innovation. Creative professionals echo this scepticism, observing that while AI can generate polished drafts, the raw outputs often feel “off” (Matthews et al. 15) or are “formulaic” outputs that undermine the intrinsic drive for experimentation and play that defines creative practice (Runco 1). These critiques highlight a deeper concern that, as GenAI becomes more widely adopted, the benchmarks by which creativity is judged may be lowered or distorted. Furthermore, from a Bourdieusian lens, the tension between technology and expertise reflects a struggle over cultural capital and taste: if expertise is what legitimises creativity, then the automation of creative labour threatens to redistribute symbolic power toward technological systems. The democratisation of generative tools, then, adds another layer of complexity. With platforms like DALL·E and Midjourney enabling anyone to produce seemingly professional content, the boundaries of what counts as valuable creativity risk becoming blurred (Ahmed and Ali; Chamakiotis and Panteli; Matthews et al.). Studies point to both the promise and the peril of this accessibility. Namely, GenAI lowers barriers to participation, but in doing so, it may also flood cultural spaces with superficial, poorly developed, distorted work (Ahmed and Ali), referred to openly as ‘AI slop’ (Smith and Southerton). The degradation of creative content could be inevitable because, as Chamakiotis and Panteli argue, GenAI privileges speed and quantity over originality and finesse. In professional settings, this tension becomes evident as GenAI enables less experienced practitioners to produce more polished work, but excessive dependence on the technology may hinder the growth of critical thinking and the refinement of creative skills (Hettrich et al.). Taken together, these dynamics raise important questions about how to preserve aesthetic standards and creative depth in an era where content creation is increasingly democratised. Accordingly, expertise remains crucial. Creativity has long been judged not only by novelty but also by peer recognition, audience reception, or what Csikszentmihalyi refers to as gatekeepers. Experts are well-placed to uphold aesthetic and quality standards because they understand the rules and practices that govern their discipline. As Bourdieu argued, those with cultural competence are deemed the most versed in encoding value in creative work and by extension maintain “explicit or implicit schemes of perception and appreciation” (2). Previous studies highlight this point, showing that while professionals view GenAI as helpful for generating ideas or producing early drafts, they stress that only a specialist can refine those outputs into work that is truly original and meaningful (DiStefano et al.; Matthews et al.). In this sense, the value of expertise lies not in resisting technology but in knowing how to use it effectively, drawing out its benefits while guarding against formulaic or tone-deaf outcomes, especially given the copyright infringement concerns that accompany GenAI-produced work. As scholars have contended, copyright conflict in creative industries stems from GenAI models using vast amounts of protected works as training data without permission (Lucchi; Torrance and Tomlinson). Supporters claim this ‘fair training’ is transformative, non-expressive, and socially beneficial (Lucchi; Torrance and Tomlinson), while critics see it as misappropriation that enables derivative, market-harming outputs (Lucchi; Torrance and Tomlinson). Given the loose legal restrictions that currently exist, it falls, in part, to creative experts to operate GenAI technology cautiously to prevent the misuse and exploitation of the creative work of others. Approaching the Research Our research set out to investigate how we, as experts in visual communication, experience GenAI. We are not only creative professionals with years of experience in our respective industries, but also academics responsible for teaching undergraduates the skills required for effective visual communication, positioning us as both practitioners and gatekeepers of disciplinary standards. As part of our research, we aimed to understand not only the functional opportunities and challenges presented by these technologies, but also the evaluative judgments that can be made about AI-generated content. We operationalised this inquiry through a collaborative autoethnography (Chang) anchored to a shared industry-style task. Using a single creative brief for a new energy drink launch (the new energy drink was presented as the first on the market to use ingredients sourced from the Amazon), we asked each practitioner–researcher to develop an end-to-end brand identity using GenAI tools (namely those offered by OpenAI, particularly DALL·E and ChatGPT-5) as the primary means of production—covering naming, logo, optional mascot, can packaging, a bus-shelter poster, and (optionally) a 15–20s spot. The brief served both as the task environment and as the evaluation frame against which creative adequacy was judged. Participants (MG, JM, AA, DF, AD) worked independently while “thinking aloud”, screen-recording their sessions, and retaining prompt logs, intermediate iterations, and exported artefacts; AN oversaw the process and methodological consistency. Our protocol was AI-first: participants attempted to complete all deliverables with GenAI; where they departed from this (e.g., corrective manual refinements), those moments were explicitly noted and treated as analytical data about breakdowns and boundary conditions. We then convened an artefact-led focus group to review outputs against the brief, surface pain points, and identify what worked and what did not from the vantage point of expert practice and pedagogy. Analytically, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke) across three data streams—process recordings and transcripts, prompt/iteration logs, and the group discussion—linking lived experience to evaluative judgements about creativity and quality. Accordingly, operating from an experiential perspective, we were able to inductively examine both the functional affordances (speed, exploration, iteration) and frictions (fidelity loss, aesthetic convergence, control over detail) of GenAI, and to clarify how expert judgment mediates whether machine-assisted work meets, falls short of, or redefines professional standards. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s model, we viewed each participant’s engagement with AI as an interaction between personal expertise (individual), the creative brief and aesthetic conventions (domain), and peer evaluation within our group (field). This structure helped ensure our analysis remained theoretically grounded, linking micro-level reflections to broader cultural questions of authorship, taste, and accountability. Inspired Ideation Our experiences of working with GenAI revealed just how valuable the technology was for brainstorming and exploration. We consistently reflected on how the act of engaging with ChatGPT-5 helped us move from a myriad of options and creative blocks into creative momentum, often describing the experience as both liberating and stimulating. One recurring idea was the way the GenAI enabled them to overcome the inertia of starting out. For instance, AA noted that she was able to become “unstuck” by having a GenAI partner to “bounce ideas off”, a sentiment echoed by others who felt the GenAI created an immediate entry point into the creative process. Another shared dimension of experience was the sense of efficiency in narrowing options. AD explained how the GenAI allowed him to test and discard unworkable directions early, giving him confidence to focus on ideas with more potential. DF described a similar advantage, pointing to the “quick iteration” made possible by GenAI and how it could generate multiple text-based possibilities, such as brand names, slogans, or directions. The experience of brainstorming with GenAI was also described as sparking ideas that participants claimed they would not have reached independently. JM, for example, highlighted how a loose brief could be transformed into “high-fidelity renders” that pushed him into new design spaces and kept inspiration flowing. MG similarly explained how the GenAI’s capacity to rapidly canvas and condense research from Amazonian animals to Portuguese vocabulary did not just save him time but opened imaginative avenues that he could then refine into his own creative vision. In these ways, the technology served less as a substitute for human creativity and more as a catalyst, nudging us toward unanticipated directions. Our accounts align closely with scholarship suggesting that GenAI enhances not just efficiency but also imagination by encouraging creators to think beyond conventional pathways (Cui, et al.; Hartmann, et al.; Hettrich, et al., Matthews, et al.). Within Csikszentmihalyi’s terms, GenAI acted as an externalised flow facilitator: it sustained momentum, expanded associative links, and provided immediate feedback loops that simulated collaborative ideation. In this sense, our experiences demonstrate that brainstorming with AI is not merely a functional shortcut but a creative encounter in its own right, one that reshapes how ideas emerge and evolve. Familiarity with the Tools A second moment of experience that emerged strongly from the reflections concerned the sense that OpenAI tools carried a “memory” of their users and often defaulted to preconceived understandings of our styles and domains. We described this as a double-edged sword. On one hand, the technology’s ability to learn our tendencies meant interactions could feel more tailored and efficient. Yet, on the other hand, this personalisation sometimes narrowed the scope of exploration, creating outputs that were less surprising or more rigid than had been hoped. What became clear in these reflections was a tension between the promise of open-ended brainstorming and the reality of a GenAI that appeared to anchor itself in prior patterns of interaction. Several of us explicitly noted how past usage influenced what the GenAI produced. MG explained that over time, his ChatGPT “had learned to work with” him, and because he primarily relied on it for data science tasks, “it knows that I work with academic rigour. It knows that I work with code, so every now and then it would actually spit out Python code at me”. AD echoed this experience, reflecting that since so many of his past prompts had begun with “give me code for”, the GenAI seemed to perceive their relationship as “more analytical, and it’s more, you know, here’s a specific task we’re solving, not so much here’s something we’re exploring”. For him, this meant that had the brief been to create a Python module, “we would have had a better time of it, because we know exactly where the caveats are”. Both accounts underline how the GenAI’s learned behaviour risked funnelling creative processes back into familiar domains. Others in the team extended this idea by considering how memory shaped their overall creative encounters. JM remarked that “it does build that kind of memory for people that have used it”, noting that when “memories [are] turned on, this will colour” the responses. He felt his own lack of frustration with the project stemmed from his long-standing “methodology” of working with the system, which gave him an awareness of its limits and common pathways. DF similarly recalled a moment when the GenAI pulled in “data from a whole other chat” after he began a new conversation and asked about the project, a misapplication that nevertheless highlighted the model’s tendency to overreach by leaning on remembered context. We also spoke about how our strategies for interacting with the GenAI were shaped by these experiences. AD admitted that he sometimes withheld the full brief because “when it has the context, it just jumps the gun”, an approach he recognised as “coloured by other experiences he had with it”. AA likewise wondered if the GenAI had “taken that on board” that she used it mainly for “ideation and refinement”. She found it reliable for brainstorming but observed that it seemed less effective when asked to generate images, almost as though it had learned her preferred use and resisted branching into other tasks. Together, these reflections highlight the ambivalence of experiencing a GenAI that appears to remember and anticipate. While this familiarity seemed to increase efficiency, it also narrowed exploration: a process Bourdieu might describe as the reproduction of habitus within a digital system. The GenAI model effectively learned and reinforced each participant’s preferences, which could reduce the novelty of output. This interaction exemplifies how algorithmic personalisation, though convenient, can, and in some instances did, amplify pre-existing creative dispositions rather than challenge them. Aesthetic Likes and Preferences A further dimension of experience participants reflected on was the aesthetics produced through their engagement with the GenAI tools. Here, the conversation often oscillated between moments of excitement when the GenAI generated something visually striking and frustration when the results felt generic, inconsistent, or resistant to refinement. What was clear across our experiences was that aesthetics mattered deeply to the creative process, and the GenAI’s ability—or inability—to deliver on those expectations shaped how useful we ultimately found it. Fig. 1: Bojo Yaruma final bus stop poster advertisement. On the positive side, some of us frequently described the thrill of seeing loose ideas turned into polished visuals. JM emphasised how rewarding it was to go from “a loose brief” to “fully developed concepts” (see fig. 1), and the way the GenAI could quickly provide “thumbnails of treatments” that opened up design pathways. Similarly, AD praised certain outputs, noting that the GenAI’s renderings were “more solid than a sketch” he could have produced himself, which made it easier to communicate a general direction. Fig. 2: “Onda” can elements. MG also observed improvements over time, recalling that some jellyfish designs he was exploring eventually resembled a “famous motif”, and he appreciated moments where colour palettes and backgrounds felt coherent, such as a “green pattern background” that integrated seamlessly with his chosen mascot (see fig. 2). AA likewise expressed satisfaction when hybridising two GenAI outputs into a logo she liked, describing her final can as “funky” and “quite cool” (see fig. 3). Fig. 3: The Jinx energy drink and advertising mock-ups. For DF, the appeal lay in how the GenAI could apply simple foliage or logos consistently to can mock-ups, making the design process feel fluid and accessible (see fig. 4). Fig. 4: The textured “Jobo” energy drink can. Yet alongside these moments of satisfaction were recurring frustrations. Many of us described the outputs as inconsistent, with the GenAI prone to “losing fidelity” when refining logos, text, or small details. JM struggled with warning labels and wordmarks, where designs would “fall apart”. DF found the GenAI’s typography “rubbish” and overly basic, lamenting the “fat logos” it seemed to prefer despite his desire for thin minimalism. In the end, he hand-designed the typography for his can because it could never get it right (see fig. 5). Fig. 5: DF’s hand-drawn logo design that worked as inspiration. AA critiqued the fonts as “quite boring” and “safe options that don’t stand out”, while MG described the colour palettes as “terrible” and the attempts at clean line work for mascots as “garbage”. AD, who had clear preferences for earthy tones and organic patterns, became frustrated when the GenAI ignored specified instructions, such as completely changing a chosen red or when the can changed style when integrated into advertising assets (see figs. 6 & 7). In Figure 7, it was also clear that the GenAI struggled to develop the basketballer’s hand: a common issue with images constructed by GenAI models, which produce people typical of the uncanny valley (Keyes and Hyland). In short, across these experiences, the sense of creative misalignment was clear. Fig. 6 (left): The final can; Fig. 7 (right): The can losing its design elements. These frustrations align with what scholars have noted about the limits of AI-driven creativity. Rather than producing genuinely novel ideas, generative systems tend to recycle established design conventions embedded in their training data, which gives the work a generic or predictable quality. For us, this meant that while the outputs could appear visually striking at first glance, they often revealed an underlying artifice. What looked like creativity was in fact the GenAI reverting to familiar stylistic tropes, leading to results that felt shallow or mismatched with the more nuanced experimentation and originality we were aiming for (Matthews et al.; Runco). A unifying critique was the perception that the GenAI’s aesthetics leaned toward the generic, evoking a “templated” quality. AD was blunt, saying that “everything looks like it was made in Canva… this is still just another Canva image at the end”, estimating that outputs fell into “90% of the barrel” of common design work rather than the “phenomenal 10%” of originality. AA saw echoes of big brands, such as a logo that looked “way too similar to Nike”, while DF dismissed many GenAI name suggestions as “pretty vanilla” and described typography as basic stock replications. MG wanted to avoid “cliché energy drink” imagery, which he felt often appeared “a bit cheese”, and JM, while more accepting, still admitted that the GenAI “has got its biases, and its training data”, pointing out that much of design is already “versions of the same thing”. These observations can be connected to the broader democratisation of the technology: because GenAI draws on vast pools of mainstream visual references, it inevitably reproduces the dominant aesthetics that circulate most widely (Ahmed and Ali; Chamakiotis and Panteli; Matthews et al.). In this sense, the similarity of outputs is less a flaw in the system than an extension of how design itself functions intertextually, with all creative work borrowing from and echoing prior styles (Baron; Shahariar). To expect GenAI to transcend these paradigms may, therefore, be unrealistic, given that its models are grounded in training data that mimic design and stylistic biases (Atkinson and Barker). What we encountered, then, was not so much a failure of the technology as the exposure of its limitations in pushing beyond conventions that are already deeply embedded in the cultural capital from which it learns. Conclusion Our findings suggest that working with GenAI is not a binary contest between human and machine, but an ongoing negotiation of creative control, aesthetic agency, and cultural value. Across our reflections, three mechanisms of co-creativity emerged: acceleration (AI as a catalyst for ideation and iteration), convergence (AI’s tendency to reproduce dominant aesthetic tropes), and refinement (the human expert’s capacity to critique and reframe AI outputs). Together, these reveal how expertise functions as both a filter and a counterweight, maintaining creative depth while navigating the efficiencies and biases of algorithmic generation. Theoretically, this study extends debates in creative cognition and computational creativity by demonstrating that expert practitioners do not simply adapt to AI but actively curate its affordances within cultural and disciplinary norms. Practically, it shows that GenAI reshapes how creative labour is distributed and valued, demanding new literacies of critique, iteration, and authorship. Culturally, it illuminates how creative work with AI becomes a site where notions of originality, authenticity, and artistic authority are being renegotiated. In this sense, GenAI does not merely assist creativity, it transforms the ecosystem in which creativity occurs. Understanding that transformation requires attention not only to the tools themselves but to the evolving practices, judgments, and aesthetic negotiations through which human expertise continues to matter. 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