Highlights

Birrbay Barray Djuyal

An immersive exhibition in Gathang voices and language at Port Macquarie Museum, introducing audiences to Birpai Country and its stories of kinship, culture and environment. Created by Aunty Rhonda Radley with Studio ESEM (Sarah Barns and Michael Killalea) and Andy Noonan. Sound mastering by Peter Hird. Features the Ngarrgan Mirriiyn Choir (recorded by Eliza Sayer), a Deep Listening reflection by Mirrilyn Gill, and a narrative reflection by Aunty Rhonda Radley.

Port Macquarie Museum

Western Sydney International Airport Digital Artworks

Digital artworks for the opening of Western Sydney International Airport, made by Studio ESEM with AX Interactive. They include Come On. Let's Play, an interactive dance work with dancers filmed across Western Sydney; The Street Beneath Our Feet, a durational work celebrating the dance culture of Greater Western Sydney; and Unboxing Aviation Archives, a six-screen display drawn from aviation archives, including Nancy-Bird Walton's 1935 barnstorming tour; and Wings of Desire.

Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport

Civic Interplay

A think and do space for agentic civics and civic AI, developed at RMIT University: an ongoing programme of writing, workshops and visual research into how AI systems are governed, and what civic agency looks like when infrastructure becomes agentic.

RMIT University

Future Now: Regenerative Storytelling for the Australian Museum

Video portraits of Australians building climate solutions, community changemaker interviews and network visualisations mapping patterns of resilience, shown in-gallery alongside an AI-driven artwork. Includes the Future Now Makers portrait series.

Climate Solutions Centre, Australian Museum

An Arts of Creative Renewal

Creative renewal strategy for Western Sydney University's Hawkesbury campus, developed with HASSELL as lead consultant. A framework for how arts and cultural programming can carry the renewal of a campus and its surrounding landscape.

Western Sydney University, with HASSELL

We Dream the City

Major commission for Vivid Sydney 2022, a 130-metre projection along the Powerhouse Museum, the festival's longest artwork, reimagining over 30 film and sound recordings from 1908 onwards as a collective dreamscape of the city's transformation.

Vivid Sydney · Esem Projects

If we care for Country, it will care for us

Inside Story

STORYBOX Places

A place-based digital engagement platform grown from Studio ESEM's placemaking practice. 17+ precinct activation programs, 250+ community storytellers, $10M in leveraged place investment. Winner of two 2026 Australian Good Design Awards, Best in Class in Digital Design and Winner in Social Impact, and of the Media Architecture Biennale Award for Participatory Media and Infrastructure.

Studio ESEM

Superorganism: Listening to the Anthropocene

An immersive sound installation weaving site-specific archival field recordings through the canopy of living trees, premiered at Brisbane's Botanica Festival and toured to Melbourne, Vivid Sydney and regional NSW destinations.

Botanica Festival · City of Brisbane · City of Melbourne · Vivid Sydney

So You Want to Live in a Pivot City?

In How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables (Meatspace Press)

The South Australian Arts Plan 2019–2024

Part of a core consultancy collaborative contracted by the SA Premier to deliver a five year Arts Plan for the SA Government, and advising on collections policy and governance for the state's cultural institutions. Included leading Town Hall consultation sessions across the SA arts sector and extensive industry sector engagement.

Government of South Australia

Bella Vista Circular Economy Living Lab

From a 2018 activation strategy along the metro corridor to a business case for the Bella Vista meanwhile-housing and circular economy innovation precinct, signed off by Landcom for a $60m start-up program with cross-agency delivery.

Sydney Metro Northwest Places · Arup · Transport NSW

Visions of Peace

Digital storytelling commissioned by Liverpool City Council to mark the Centenary of Armistice, projecting onto the buildings and shopfronts of Liverpool City. Creative workshops with students from Liverpool Girls High School surfaced personal perspectives on peace, many from families who arrived in Australia from war-torn countries and had not told their stories before, alongside archival recordings from the National Film and Sound Archive and the Australian War Memorial.

Liverpool City Council · Liverpool Girls High School

Waves of People: Exploring the movements and patterns of migration that have shaped Parramatta through time

City of Parramatta

CSIRO Urban Living Labs

Established the Urban Living Labs Innovation Precinct Strategy and Partnership Framework with CSIRO Data61 and the $5bn Sydney Science Park, a research-led framework carrying national science expertise into built-environment outcomes.

CSIRO · Data61 · Celestino

White Bay Innovation Strategy: Smart City Principles

Urban Growth NSW, with SGS Economics and Terroir Architecture

Data Partnerships for City Indicators

Data61, for the Cities Unit, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

Towards the Data-Driven, Responsive City?

Committee for Sydney (#wethecity3)

A Digital, Design and Curatorial Strategy for Rutherford’s Den

Arts Centre of Christchurch

Creative Innovation Strategy

The first national creative industries strategy for the Australia Council for the Arts.

Australia Council for the Arts

An integrated online and mobile strategy for the ABC

ABC Online Executive

Thinking Spaces

Soundscape accompanying a series of projection installations meditating on the history of the ANU campus, staged over two weeks in 2013. Written up with Shanti Sumartojo as When One Idea Led to Another in The Senses and Society.

Australian National University

Last Drinks: One Last Round at the Australia Hotel

A major Art & About commission for the City of Sydney, staged in Martin Place and Rowe Street. The work summoned the Australia Hotel and the vanished Rowe Street arcade back into the streets that replaced them, using archival recordings and voices of the people who drank, worked and shopped there. The installation is long gone, but the soundscapes survive and can still be listened to.

Major Art & About commission, City of Sydney · Esem Projects

Past Forward: opening the ABC archives under Creative Commons

Negotiated the release of ABC television and radio archive material under CC BY 2.0 through ABC Pool. This moved broadcast recordings out of a closed archive and into public circulation, where they could be listened to, reused and rebuilt on. The recordings gathered here under Voices came out of this program.

Partnership program with ABC Pool, Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The death and life of the real-time city: Re-imagining the city of digital urbanism

Real-time city technologies reimagined as connection points to the "real times of space", ambient sound archives used to create mobile listening experiences that reveal contested spatial histories.

Doctoral thesis, University of Technology Sydney, awarded April 2011

Unguarded Moments

A public space archive project at Millers Point with Michael Killalea of Studio ESEM. 'Girl Eating a Sandwich' plays on a loop, looking back from the 1930s docks, wondering about the future world she finds herself in.

Studio ESEM