ACMI Experimental Forum

Barcode People (Qihao Liang, Tong Shu) is a creative duo based in Naarm/Melbourne, syncing hyper-surrealism with immersive digital expression. Their practice instantiates uncanny presence through post-internet aesthetics, rendered through performance, installation, gaming simulation, and video works. Their recent works have been developed or presented at Bus Projects, Goethe-Institut Beijing,HAU Hebbel-am-Ufer(HAU4), Berlin Art Week 2025, The 7th Wrong Biennale, Footscray Community Arts, Next Wave, Melbourne Fringe, LOOKLIVE, La Mama, Darebin Arts Centre, and SCOPE BLN.

Aimee Raitman is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Through a practice that examines universal experiences (most recently, an interest in ageing), Aimee often involves members of the community in her research. She has a strong interest in taking improvisation from process into performance, and connects with audiences using participation in live contexts.

Aimee holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) from the Victorian College of the Arts, where she received the VCA Choreographic Award. Her work has been supported by Australian Dance Theatre, the Adelaide Fringe Foundation, Geelong Arts Centre, Lucy Guerin Inc., and Dancehouse. Aimee is currently an Artist in Residence at The Space Dance and Arts Centre.

Oliver Lardner is an artist working across virtual reality, game design, and installation. His practice examines how technologies such as VR and machine learning reshape public space and collective experience, often staging works between physical sites and headset-based virtual environments. Through virtual pavilions, immersive worlds, and hybrid installations, his work asks what public art means inside private head-mounted displays. Lardner has exhibited nationally, and his VR work has been recognised by the Australian Game Developer Awards. Based in Melbourne, currently completing Master of Fine Art (Research) at Monash University, artist in residence at Linden New Art and ACMI X.

Jack Lee is Chinese Malaysian artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, working across photography, moving image, projection, and digital art. His practice interrogates social norms and the construction of “in-between” cultures, often reflecting on themes of diasporic identity, migration, and our relationship with non-human species. Through his work, Lee examine how those who exist outside dominant racial, gendered, and sexual narratives navigate and negotiate majority culture. Drawing on personal and collective histories, he explores the tensions between visibility and erasure, belonging and alienation. For Lee, art becomes a process of disidentification - an act of both resistance and redefinition, where inherited structures are unsettled and alternative ways of being can emerge.