Why We’re in Distraction: SWISP Lab at Science Gallery Melbourne

Join us to hack DISTRACTION.
Play the game.
Share your story.
Remix data.
Design futures.
For the planet.

Tonight, Distraction opens at Science Gallery Melbourne and with it, SWISP Lab begins a living lab residency unlike any other.

For those of you who’ve traveled with us before, you’ll know SWISP as a space of speculative wanderings, where wonder and wickedness, pedagogy and play meet. We are artists, researchers, and educators working at the edges of climate collapse, digital overload, and educational futures.

We believe the stories young people carry are not just important; they’re crucial.

They pulse with world-making potential.

Over the past several years, our partnership with Science Gallery has evolved into a research kinship.

From hackathons in Atlanta, Georgia and Melbourne to reverberations across Bengaluru and New Delhi, we’ve returned again and again to the question: how do we attend to the world differently, together?

With the whole bloody catastrophe laid our before us, at what point do you intervene?

This time, we return with Distraction.

Not to fight it. Not to fix it.
But to hack it.
To flip the script.

To ask:

What if distraction often framed as weakness or failure is actually a portal? A method? A mode of survival, of attunement, of resistance?

Why Distraction? Why Now?

The climate crisis is not just a crisis of carbon or economics it is a crisis of attention, of care, of imagination.

And in the digital age, where every scroll, click, and ping pulls us away from the now, SWISP dares to linger. To slow. To scatter with purpose. Through speculative design, participatory datawork, and youth a/r/tography, we explore the entangled relations between Land, technology, and humans.

Our practice is called a/r/tography or art/research/teaching as a way of being, knowing, doing, relating – a becoming. And when it’s participatory and youth-led, it becomes a force: for climate justice, for educational equity, for worldbuilding.

What Happens in the Living Lab?

For the season of Distraction, the gallery becomes our studio, our site, our lab. We’ll host:

• The HAK.io mega game: an experimental climate futures game made for and with young people
• Wondering walks and data remixes: where sonic fragments and collage collide
• A growing Distraction Response Archive (Zine wall) and Resonation Salon (Zine corner and library)
• And finally, a HAK.io Reverberation Wall; a living, breathing installation of youth-created futures, destined for COP30 in Brazil.

So Why Do We Do It?

Because the future is not a fixed endpoint.
Because justice is not abstract.
Because education must be creative, collective, and courageous.

SWISP Lab doesn’t just research the world as it is, we research as if the world could be otherwise. And we do it with young people. In galleries, in labs, in the in-betweens.

We are delighted to partner again with Science Gallery Melbourne, whose commitment to youth, to curiosity, and to futures-thinking has created the conditions for our research to thrive.

We invite you, educators, artists, scientists, wanderers, and wonderers to enter with us.

Distraction is not something to avoid. It’s something to explore. It’s where futures begin.

Visit our Living Lab site
Contact us: swisp-lab@unimelb.edu.au
Science Gallery Melbourne: Distraction runs 26 JULY 2025 – 2 MAY 2026