Virginia Barratt BA (Hons) is known as a pioneer in Australian new media art, beginning her practice in the area in the late nineteen eighties in text-based virtual spaces, mobilising multiple avatars to explore affective immaterialities and the real/virtual split.
She was director of Australian Network for Art & Technology from 1989-1991. She was also a founding member of VNS Matrix (1991-1996) and had a long engagement with Artist Run Initiatives in Brisbane as the director, with Adam Boyd, of John Mills National. She was also a founding member of the Queensland Artworker’s Alliance.
She has worked in the fields of gender and technology, performance, writing and academia. Her early performance work and much of her early writing explored the radical potential of queerness (as a political ideology as well as a politics of sexual identity). She taught media studies at the University of Western Sydney and Southern Cross University from 2002-2007.
She is currently (2015) a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Sydney’s Writing and Society Centre. Her work in the area of experimental poetics remediates certain embodied practices from pathological narratives, describing new philosophical and strategic spaces of urgency and agency.
Virginia is an activist choosing to live and work in an ethics of sustainability, and this is integral to her work of interrogating resistance models for speculative post-capital futures. Her poetic, polemic and performative works are published in TEXT journal, Banquet, Overland among others and in 2015 works are forthcoming from Stein and Wilde + Writing from Below. She collaborates with Doll Yoko aka gashgirl aka francesca da rimini and others and embraces the DIWO (Doing It With Others: Catlow and Garret)approach to artmaking.
- Writers:
- AMAH
Olivia Bolton
virginia barratt
- Date written:
- 2013
- Last updated:
- 2015
