V
Barratt

Dr V Barratt (AKA Dr Panic) (they/them) is a grateful guest on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people, working as trans-media artist, researcher, and performer for over 30 years. Their creative life has been shaped by connective and affective forces—communities, collaborations, and charged intersections where bodies, politics, violence, love, emotions, and machines converge.

In 1991, Barratt co-founded cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix to remap cyberculture with a feminist bent. The project abides, as does their collaboration with Matrix member Francesca da Rimini as In Their Interior. These threads weave through decades—BoneDirt, Swamp Writing, countless accomplices. DIWO (Doing It With Others, Furtherfield, UK) remains core: a politics of production insisting we are never making alone.

Barratt's work is marked by Mary Beth Dempster's sympoiesis: making-with in open systems, dissolving boundaries between disciplines, individuals, and all other beings. Their doctoral research explored panic, affect, and deterritorialization through autotheoretical praxis—the body as site of knowledge, the voice as glitch and resistance.

Performance, excessive vocalities, digital tinkering, and upcycled object making form their practice. Recurring themes: affect and embodiment, existential philosophy, care labor, collectivity, communion with the plant world, geo-trauma, art as waste. Recent works include This is my Voice: Post-gender polyphony (Adhocracy 2024), Exosmosis with Em König (Samstag Museum 2022), My Body Belongs to the Hole (ACCA 2022), and Rupture: All the Stars Unshining (Liveworks 2022). They are working toward publication of their PhD thesis Beside My Self. The work persists in the body's archive of gesture and breath, in collective memory and composting material traces—always becoming.