ACMI WIP Night Archive

Today's AI is a 食我 | 鬼 (hungry ghost): a being from Buddhist cosmology and Chinese folklore cursed to devour endlessly, born now to consume the internet, its compulsion merely renamed as training and optimisation. The HUNmeGRY Ghost reframes the classic Breakout gaming experience, each brick a data-question in an ever-reforming wall. The player controls the paddle: that act of control is the exact moment the curse begins.

Barcode People is Qihao Liang & Tong Shu: 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.

Scour for clues as, well, a sack, in the new game Sack Investigation. In this puzzle platform, join with up to 8 players to solve puzzles and evade hazards to unveil cursed objects. Collect "sackels" scattered around each level to upgrade your sack capabilities and overcome any challenge.

Code Junction Cons are Callum Chatfield, Mally He & Reid Nelson. They aim to create cooperative experiences that connect people through social play. They want to offer friend groups casual gameplay that anyone can use to wind down and have fun.

Sadie, 11, has borrowed the Necronomicon from the local library and has taken it down to the cemetery to commune with her sister, where she accidentally opens an inter-dimensional rift. Partway is an action RPG which follows Sadie and the Necronomicon as they battle through the horrors of the Below to discover the secrets hidden in long-abandoned corners of the cemetery (and hopefully Sadie's sister: who hid their GameToy before selfishly dying...Ugh!)

Past Bedtime Studios are a small queer indie games team based in Melbourne. They are Felix Donahoo-Andrusiak, Novel Deckert, Dominic Lindros, Sean Lee, Nicoletta Zorbas, Bea Brozek & Booker Schwab. Their goal is to make games that showcase an Australian identity and to make games in a community setting. The studio's motto is "making cool things is cool!"

Lamina Bruise is a surreal first-person, sci-fi adventure set in a handcrafted and atmospheric world. A tense yet meditative experience, paced by thoughtful puzzles tightly knit with the narrative.

Nicola Acler is an Italian game artist, designer and developer based in Melbourne.

Talk to people, ghosts and animals and convince them to summon you to ‘Cure the World' in this new interactive fiction game by Not Disappointment. Be careful not to reveal your true plan for world domination, or they won’t summon you and the world will fall into the hands... or tentacles, of the elders . Multiple characters to talk to, multiple endings to get, and minigames to play, all in a cutesy-yet-creepy package.

Not Disappointment is a small indie team of three Melbourne game's design graduates, taking their capstone project and making it into a full game! They compirse of Teagan: Game Lead and Programmer, the numbers person! Natasha: Sound Designer, Lead Writer and UI Artist (doing a bit of everything) and Dorian: Lead Artist, Background Designer and Second Writer (if it looks pretty, it was probably done by him!).

"The self-destruct sequence has been initiated. There are 10 minutes remaining. Awaiting further instructions."

SCAI Alpha is a first-person sci-fi escape room game for PC, powered by a unique, fully-local LLM as the starship computer. Using your microphone and integrated speech recognition, you must socially engineer the starship’s AI into cancelling the self-destruct. Negotiate, pull rank, try to be an engineer, or trap it in logical paradoxes to survive.

Super Constructor is the brainchild of Ivan Neeson, who has been making games for over 15 years. He co-founded Kumobius in 2010 and Super Constructor in 2016. He created "Duet" (Kumobius) and "Wall Kickers" (Super Constructor), which together have been downloaded over 65 million times worldwide.

Some Kind of Record is an arts, media, everything collective designed to bring creatives from all disciplines together into a community space to connect, develop and promote their work.

Created by artist and filmmaker Sabrina Phillips Brash and filmmaker Vivian Dobbie-Glazier, Some Kind of a Record curated the group exhibition Mémoire Trajectoire at Odeon Richmond in 2025, and founded the Society of Doing Something (SODS), while also creating personal film and art projects.

Zeta H-D, a graduate of a Bachelor of Film and TV (Honours) and now studying a Bachelor of Comedy, loves whimsy. With a penchant for group exhibition curation and ballet, she has a bouquet of passions whilst she aspires to build a strong skill set that will allow her to earn a living, and inspire laughter, change and connection in the process.

In Globetrotting, shot on Super 8 film in Paris and Spain, using paper-cut out animation and voiceover, Hamilton-Durkin transforms a feeling of loneliness into magic via a childhood story of a horse.

Josie Buden is a local queer producer, writer and intimacy coordinator. After working in theatre for the last two years, they have grown restless. They have re-focused their practice around the elements of scale spectacle and working with public spaces.

Paper Person Adventures is an ambitious undertaking of shooting ten short films in ten months. Designed as a project that encourages experimentation of styles and exploration of themes, it will lead to a full body of varied work in late 2026.

About 4 Minutes is a fiction writing exercise created with the intention to strengthen the creative muscle. In this work, the writer aims to explore the magic in the mundane by playing with imagination and words.

Savannah Selimi is a writer who never writes. More seriously, she is a curious listener, avid memoir reader, notebook carrier and true friend.

Mitchie and Dot is the first installation of a claymation project-in-progress that encourages the playful and imaginative nature of this form of slow filmmaking. Mitchie and Dot are each other's twin flame, and the attic bedroom is their safe place. Isabel hopes that it will resonate with queer people as a small materialisation of queer love and safety.

Isabel Savenake is filmmaker, editor, aspiring cinematographer, and lover of all things digital and analogue media.