Home Economix is an Australian network of media artists, curators, designers, researchers, creative technologists and writers, exploring digital and mixed reality (XR) interventions in domestic and public space. Our founding members are Jess Herrington, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Kate Matthews, Daniel Savage and Denise Thwaites, with the support of Tactical Space Lab, Ainslie + Gorman Arts Centres, the University of Canberra and Australia Council for the Arts.
Since the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020, membranes separating domestic and public life have become increasingly porous. We now take meetings from bed among cats and babies, while gingerly avoiding one another’s microbial clouds in public space. Creative community-building has been forced to rapidly adapt to new media and methods of connection in order to make and present work. Can we emerge from this period with fairer, more accessible and inclusive ways to work as artists?
In response to these questions, Home Economix embarked on a year-long trans-disciplinary experiment in sharing and developing digital skills and projects in physically distanced, domestic contexts. Inspired by open-source and studio-based approaches, this website documents our decentralized methods of learning and developing work online. It tracks our journey, as we explored the possibilities and challenges of creating more accessible and inclusive spaces online. Part video-diary, part resource hub, we share our questions, failures, processes, bugs and glitches, while demystifying the processes of making art in a peri-pandemic era.