In this blog, the Vitalities Lab team members and visitors will publish news and reports about our research activities and events.
Welcome to our blog
New research project for the Vitalities Lab
Leader of the Vitalities Lab, Deborah Lupton, has received funding from the Australian Research Council for a new project on ‘Atmospheres of Wellbeing’. Further details of the project can be found here.
Vital Encounters #2: The Vitalities Lab Salon Series
The Vitalities Lab presents a new salon for sharing arts-led and creative research in the more-than-human worlds we inhabit. This series is organised by Professor Deborah Lupton, Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, and Dr Anastasia Murney.
Each gathering offers a space for lively exchange across disciplines, exploring how creative methods can illuminate the vitalities that emerge when humans encounter non-human entities – other living beings, the four elements of earth, wind, air, and fire, geological features, and human-made objects, including built environments and digital devices.
Bringing together researchers, practitioners, artists, curators, thinkers, and the creatively curious, these salons feature special guests and activities that invite participants to engage with more-than-human entanglements in innovative and surprising ways.
Salon #2: Cloudship Press (Tessa Zettel & Susie Nelson) and Anastasia Murney, Reading the Cards in Precarious Times
The arts of healing (including Tarot, oracle and divination cards, astrology, and more) are undergoing a revitalisation of sorts. Perhaps the prospect of societal collapse due to anthropogenic climate change is, in part, fueling a hunger for new/old tools and knowledges that can speak to profound feelings of emotional destabilisation and the confounding, existential forces that elude representation.
This Salon will reflect on how and why artists are incorporating the arts of healing into their practice. Is this representative of the limits of ‘rational’ knowledge-making systems? What is their relationship to the future? Can these methods help to develop strategies for ecological survival? What are the risks and complexities?
Tessa Zettel will discuss the activities of Cloudship Press and their focus on creating slow, handcrafted materials attentive to multispecies flourishing. She will share insights into the development of The Alchemy of Compost (Moon Planting Guide): Transmutation Cards (2023), a beautiful set of twenty-eight cards tracking one lunar cycle of compost, featuring watercolour drawings and poems held in a world of microbes. The cards can be read as a deconstructed chapbook, a dubious guide, a frippery, a cipher or a seed.
Anastasia Murney will discuss her facilitating of group Tarot readings in relation to climate crisis and anxiety. She approaches Tarot as a form of ‘affective cartography’, weaving together stories and emotions into unexpected arrangements. Her presentation will focus on Kandos Oracle, a socially engaged artwork-in-progress for the 2026 Cementa festival in Kandos on Dabee Wiradjuri land. This project reflects on the challenges facing regional communities and aims to produce a large-scale, participatory Tarot reading in response to a question formulated in collaboration with local people.
WHEN: 13 November 2025
TIME: 3pm – 4:30pm
HOW TO JOIN: Via Microsoft Teams. Join the meeting Now
Bios:
Tessa Zettel is an artist, writer and research working across disciplines to image and enact potential worlds. She collaborated variously with others on projects attending to more-than-human cultural relations and knowledge. These involve bringing everyday practices like foraging, fermenting, and composting into experimental, participatory forms of mapping, drawing, performance, publishing & exchange. Tessa is co-director of Frontyard Projects, the Weathering Collective, the T. Rudzinskaite Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society, Collective Disaster and Cloudship Press.
Cloudship Press is a micro-publisher formed by Tessa Zettel & Susie Nelson in 2017 on Gadigal land, Sydney. They make slow, handcrafted publications that share skills for multispecies flourishing or forms of situated knowledge in need of circulation, usually as part of expanded live art projects and relational practices off the page.
Dr Anastasia Murney is an artist, researcher, and award-winning educator living on unceded Gadigal land. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Social Research in Health and The Vitalities Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). She holds a PhD in Art Theory and Visual Culture (2021) and teaches across contemporary art, social movements, and environmental humanities. Anastasia has published her research in international peer-reviewed journals and edited books published by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. She has led creative arts workshops at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Wollongong Art Gallery, and Frontyard Projects in Marrickville, Sydney.
Professor Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, media and cultural studies, and often involves arts-based and other creative methods for research and community engagement. She is located in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, leading both the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Professor Lupton is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of NSW and has been awarded two honorary doctorates. She is the author/coauthor of 20 academic books and editor/co-editor of a further 11 volumes.
Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is an Australian-Swedish curator, writer, and researcher based on Dharug and Gundungurra Country. Her expertise lies in eco-aesthetics, curatorial theory, and water-based methodologies. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Research Associate at UNSW within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Bronwyn holds a PhD in curatorial theory and maintains an independent curatorial practice. Her research proposing the Hydrocene as a disruptive epoch is internationally recognized and is the focus of her monograph, The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (Routledge, Environmental Humanities Series 2024).
Further Information:
Introducing Vital Encounters: The Vitalities Lab Salon Series, Salon #1 with Vanessa Bartlett
The Vitalities Lab presents a new salon for sharing arts-led and creative research in the more-than-human worlds we inhabit. This series is organised by Professor Deborah Lupton, Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, and Dr Anastasia Murney.
Each gathering offers a space for lively exchange across disciplines, exploring how creative methods can illuminate the vitalities that emerge when humans encounter non-human entities – other living beings, the four elements of earth, wind, air, and fire, geological features, and human-made objects, including built environments and digital devices. Bringing together researchers, practitioners, artists, curators, thinkers, and the creatively curious, these salons feature special guests and activities that invite participants to engage with more-than-human entanglements in innovative and surprising ways.
Salon #1: Vanessa Bartlett, Gut Waters
Gut Waters (Bankstown Arts Centre, 26 July–6 September 2025) is a new exhibition that explores the role of the human gut in reimagining our health and place in the world. It connects worlds inside and outside of our bodies, by linking digestion to Bankstown’s wastewater systems, moon cycles, and human poop transplants.
Dr Bartlett will discuss Gut Waters as an outcome of her four year long collaborative medical humanities project Stomach Ache. She will explore the process of translating lived experience-led and medical humanities research into curatorial research and practice, and how this can engender messy, awkward and generative research insights overlooked in more traditional approaches.
Professor Deborah Lupton and Dr Anastasia Murney will also introduce their ARC Discovery project on sociobiological immunity systems and the microbiome and an upcoming workshop in conjunction with Gut Waters on Saturday September 6. The workshop will invite participants to use craft materials to create a body map, encouraging them to think about what goes in and out of the gut, what does it look like, and how does it feel? It is designed to help participants to think differently about digestion.
WHEN: 4 September 2025
TIME: 3pm – 4:30pm
HOW TO JOIN: Via Microsoft Teams. Join the meeting now
Gut Waters, curated by Dr Vanessa Bartlett, exhibition at Bankstown Arts Centre, 26 July – 6 September 2025. Photo: Dean Qiulin Li.
Bios:
Dr Vanessa Bartlett is a visual art curator, arts and wellbeing specialist and artist. She brings art and people together to explore how equality, ethics and social justice are influenced by the medical and technical systems that shape our lives. She specializes in curating exhibitions and creative projects that explore themes of mental and physical health, disability justice and ethics and practices of care. She was McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication (2020–2023), and Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law (2024–2025), at the University of Melbourne.
Professor Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, media and cultural studies, and often involves arts-based and other creative methods for research and community engagement. She is located in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, leading both the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Professor Lupton is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of NSW and has been awarded two honorary doctorates. She is the author/coauthor of 20 academic books and editor/co-editor of a further 11 volumes.
Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is an Australian-Swedish curator, writer, and researcher based on Dharug and Gundungurra Country. Her expertise lies in eco-aesthetics, curatorial theory, and water-based methodologies. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Research Associate at UNSW within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Bronwyn holds a PhD in curatorial theory and maintains an independent curatorial practice. Her research proposing the Hydrocene as a disruptive epoch is internationally recognized and is the focus of her monograph, The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (Routledge, Environmental Humanities Series 2024).
Dr Anastasia Murney is an artist, researcher, and award-winning educator living on unceded Gadigal land. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Social Research in Health and The Vitalities Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). She holds a PhD in Art Theory and Visual Culture (2021) and teaches across contemporary art, social movements, and environmental humanities. Anastasia has published her research in international peer-reviewed journals and edited books published by Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. She has led creative arts workshops at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Wollongong Art Gallery, and Frontyard Projects in Marrickville, Sydney.
Further Information:
Animal Robot Island exhibit
For the recent ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society annual symposium, Deborah Lupton and Megan Rose mounted an exhibit called Animal Robot Island.
With this installation, we seek to surface the broader difficult issues of the environmental impacts of AI and automated technologies, acknowledging that human and planetary health are intertwined and interdependent. This installation is part of the Centre of Excellence’s new signature project on ADM, Ecosystems and Multispecies Relationships. As contributors to this project, we are exploring the relational and affective ties that are generated when humans come together with robotic animal devices. We seek to make connections between the ethical issues that are raised concerning the benefits and harms of human-animal and human-robot relationships.
Our research asks the following questions:
- What can help us live better with our robotic animal companions in ways that benefit humans without harming the environment and other animals and living things?
- What do we like about robotic animals?
- What do we find creepy or discomforting about them?
Animal Robot Island is inhabited by robotic animal creatures living together in apparent harmony. Its visual appearance is inspired by the popular Nintendo video game Animal Crossing, a social simulation game which invites players to create a village inhabited by cute anthropomorphic animal creatures. Animal Crossing was created to encourage players to engage with the simulated ‘natural’ world by cultivating plants, fruit picking, collecting seashells, catching insects, fishing and hunting for fossils as well as living alongside the animal creatures in the village.
Like Animal Crossing, Animal Robot Island is a soft, welcoming space, with references to kawaii (Japanese cute culture) and gamification of animals for care, connection, comfort and entertainment. But there are hints at a darker, more sinister underbelly of this apparently sweet, colourful world. We reflect on the question of how these kinds of idealised communities/ecosystems harm the ‘real’ natural environment and wonder what happens to these creatures when they ‘die’? Where do their ‘remains’ (the waste left behind by their electronic, plastics and fabric components) go?
New research methods publication
Autism supports project underway
Our project ‘Non-human Supports Used by Autistic People for Connection, Health and Wellbeing’ is well underway. This autistic-led project explores how autistic people employ a range of objects, services and creatures to support their wellbeing and find comfort, care and connection. The study’s findings offer insights into the everyday and creative ways that autistic people understand, (re)imagine and engage with non-human support activities, practices and things. It is co-funded by the Vitalities Lab and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
For the study, autistic adults were interviewed online by project lead Dr Megan Rose. The interview questions asked participants about the kinds of supports (other than people) they use as part of their everyday lives: e.g. for entertainment and leisure, connection with others, cultivating a special interest, dealing with burnout or sensory challenges, and promoting health and wellbeing.
We informed participants that we were taking a very broad view in defining ‘supports’, including ‘things, places and creatures that help you get through the day as an autistic person and deal with any challenges or difficulties’. Participants were asked what supports they used most regularly, what they found most useful or helpful, whether there were any aspects about these supports they didn’t like, which was their favourite support activity or thing (if any), and to explain their answers. The final question asked participants: ‘If you had the chance to design a new support activity or thing to help you in your everyday life – what would it be? How would it help you? What would it look like?’
We have made a short film about some of the participants’ experiences, which can be viewed here.
Currently we are writing academic papers and conference presentations to communicate the findings from the project. We are also working with the wonderful graphic illustrator Sarah Firth, who we commissioned to make ‘portraits’ of each participant using words and images to depict the challenges they face, the supports they use to help them cope with these challenges, and their special interests. We’ll be using these portraits in both our academic outputs and in public-facing open access publications to share with the autistic community and other interested people.
Vitalities Lab 