Cover Image: Delegates take their seats beneath the museum’s iconic whale skeleton for a plenary session at REMIX Summit Perth. Photo: Mikayla Compton

REMIX Summit Perth 2025
Tuesday, 11th November 2025
WA Museum Boola Bardip

The 6^th REMIX summit explores the intersection between culture, technology and entrepreneurship, according to their website. The event is held in locations like New York, Sydney and Dubai and focuses on creative cities, creative leaders and creative enterprises.

This year the event featured a variety of speakers, some international like John McGrath of Factory International in Manchester, UK and Sean Lee of d’strict digital design and art in South Korea as well as many local and national thought leaders and experts in various creative industries including Creative Australia and the WA Department of Creative Industries, Tourism and Sport.

Held at WA Museum Boola Baardip, the opening round of speakers were the civic officials of Perth and WA; Jason Fair of WAM Boola Bardip flagged their intention of creating a permanent digital immersive gallery in 2026, Perth Lord Mayor Bruce Reynolds claimed that in Perth, culture and the arts isn’t an afterthought, but essential to the fabric of the city, Hon Simone McGurk WA’s minister for creative industries highlighted the state’s strategic direction of commercialisation, international pathways and taskforce creation. Clearly the creative industries need to drive economic growth in WA it seems. Interestingly, McGurk also mentioned tax reform for the creative industries so it seems a good time to get in touch about taxation. Then came Chad Anderson, the newly arrived Director General of WA’s Creative Industries, Tourism and Sport who was very excited about inviting expressions of interest for the new sculpture park at Perth Observatory in the hills.

The format of the day was a series of speakers in the main hall, with the opportunity to follow speakers into a separate room for a Q&A session if you wished or stay for the next speaker. 

John McGrath, famous Artistic Director and CEO of Manchester International Festival, had just finished building a new venue in the heart of Manchester. John spoke about working with artists to create new work, providing skills development and career pathways for local young people, paying organisers to engage marginalised communities in the work of Factory International and most interestingly, devolving decision making to the community – even having community groups that elect people from the community to sit on the Board!

Sean Henriques has been steering the delivery of ECU City Campus (WAAPA plus), the $853 million project that aims to break boundaries between disciplines and place a building that is a canvas for creativity in the heart of the city. Sean gave us a sneak peek of what the final interiors will look like.

Ken Arnold brought his decades of experience at the Wellcome Collection in London and more recently the medical museum in Copenhagen to the event, examining the purpose of physical spaces and collections in an increasingly digital world. Ken proposed that museums are social machines for looking and thinking collectively in a non-digital environment.  In terms of attention span Ken proposed these timings –

Digital: 5-90 seconds
Live events: 5-90 minutes
Temporary exhibitions: 5-90 days
Permanent buildings: 5-90 years.

Following these three “heavy hitters”, the day continued with speakers examining how our built form encourages or restricts creativity, opportunities for digital engagement and immersion, how skills and knowledge development affects creative careers and how structures of support might need to change.

Kate Schaffer spoke to the precarity of the creative artist and how inherently unsafe a lot of the industry is, for various reasons. Kate invited all of us to participate in a survey to help work out how Creative Australia can improve working conditions and safety for all creative artists in Australia through a new website creativeworkplaces.gov.au.

Most of the speakers agreed on one thing: the future won’t be built in silos. With digital realms, AI and audience engagement changing rapidly, connection between disciplines and collaboration between creative communities will drive the flexibility of creative and artistic sectors.

Kate Fielding from A New Approach, Australia’s national culture think tank argued for a national arts and culture strategy that sat outside of politics, centring the role of arts and culture as vital to national identity, culture and intercultural/intergenerational reflection and connection. Dr Nikki Miller from WA’s Dept of Creative Industries outlined the creative industries action plan, focusing on young people and tertiary creative futures courses.

Oron Catts of UWA argued against the prevailing opinions of the arts being an economic driver of productivity advocating for ‘the usefulness of useless knowledge’. Using his research and experience, focussing on the art of life and death and ingesting art, I understood that the implications of his intervention was to challenge the notion that only ‘productive’ art should be supported. Art is more than a career option and an industry that contributes to GDP growth. Art shouldn’t have to prove its dollar value.

The day finished with a story. Sean Lee told us the story of the website design company in Korea in 2009 that made a business decision to move into immersive tech. After a series of successes and failures over the next 15 years his company d’strict is now at the cutting edge of immense digital screen technology at the intersection of advertising, public art and public engagement. The extraordinary projects that they have designed and installed in recent years have created visual impact, profound conversations and made lots of money. However, when the cutting edge tech is the substance of the work, you always have to be looking over your shoulder at your competitors just about to overtake or overwhelm you.

Hannah Matthews, director of PICA has a different approach with Boorda Yeyi – Future Now – a funded three year immersive arts program which supports artists to explore and extend their practice through technology. Michael Jalaru Torres from Broome in the Kimberley is exploring traditional stories of the moon and tides working with Michael Ovens to develop a VR headset experience. As Claire Evans of Junior Major states – S1:T2

Story first, tech second. Artists determine the nature of the artistic interaction, the effect they are attempting to achieve and the stories they wish to tell. The technology is simply another tool to help the artist.