Writing

Published texts, experimental poetics, and critical writing. Full archive on Academia.edu.

2026 un Magazine

Guest Editorial: Stones and Circuits — Art, AI, & the More-Than-Human Commons

with Julianne Pierce

un Magazine, Issue 20.1 (forthcoming 2026)

This issue asks how artists can engage with technology amid ecological crisis, displacement, and rising authoritarianism, proposing the commons as an anti-racist, de-colonial, and trans-feminist strategy for reimagining technology. It envisions computation as relational and material—rooted in earth, body, and community—and intelligence as shared among human and more-than-human entities.

V Barratt & Julianne Pierce are Adelaide/Tarntanya-based artists & founding members of the influential cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix.

2026 fine print

mMouth hHouse pPanic cCathedral

fine print, Issue 36: Queer (2026)

So much has happened.

Nothing has happened.

I am busy staying alive in inhospitable times.
2025 West Space

no rock no flower

Essay for Andrea Illés, West Space (2025)

no rock no flower seeks a loving eye, a tender aperture. The camera re-purposed as caress. The loving eye operates differently. Where the violent eye insists on categories—male/female, right/wrong, real/fake—the loving eye sees process. It grants opacity: relation without capture. It understands that the body it beholds is always plural, always exceeding the frame. Hyper-vigilance becomes hyper-agency: self-imaging inverted into art, insisting on too much beauty, too much self; a refusal of the metric of “enough.”
2020 Axon Journal

Writing with Swamp: an E-co[|]lab Mani-fe[a]st[o]

with Ashley Haywood & Nick Taylor

Axon Journal, 10 no. 2 (2020)

This manifesto is a feast and distillation, a momentary concretisation or sedimentation. Virginia Barratt, Ashley Haywood and Nick Taylor are a sprawling swamp-writing collaboration. We have been writing together since 2015. We take the following concepts as starting points: Mary-Beth Dempster’s proposition of sympoiesis; complex evolving semiotic-material systems; and resistance to the ‘anaerobic’ nature of lone authorship. We believe we are always writing-with in life.
2020 Axon Journal

A Mouth Swallowing the Storm

with F. da Rimini

Axon Journal, 10 no. 2 (2020)

In this text three emergent accomplices — Krill, Spore and Terra — give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. They express an ‘animistic perception’ mirroring humans’ ‘default setting’ to ‘encounter … sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers’ (Abrams 2019, n.p.). These voices without organs, arising from an alembic transcribed with arcane symbols, had been channeled by In Her Interior (IHI) through field trips, programmatic word theft and the fugue-induced sympoiesis (Dempster 2000) of collaborative writing across timespace and collective production in open systems; inviting surprise, disappointment, destabilisation, crisis, fleeting resolution and homeostasis. The iterative conditions of making were creation-destruction-crisis-creation anew. And thus the results were generative and theoretically repeatable.
2019 Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

Cyberfeminist Timelords

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 42 no. 2 (2019)

Cyberfeminist Timelords is a work of speculative fiction, its core poetic meditation framed by an essay. Perhaps it is not about a singular artificial intelligence, but rather an expression of multiple intelligences, especially the more-than-human.

Cyberfeminist Forecasting — a conversation with V Barratt (with F da Rimini, Medium)

2019 Writing From Below

Xenokin and Queer Morphologies

Writing From Below (2019)

This text was first presented at the 2018 South Australian Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Gender, Sex, and Sexualities conference: ‘Space and Place: Conceptions of movement, belonging and boundaries’, and is a response to the themes of kinship and connection. The text is the result of an experiment in co-creation through the application of situated knowledges. By turns autoethnographic, speculative, and poetic, the text responds affectively to the work of building ‘xenofam’ and kin beyond ties of blood and genealogy.
2018 Cordite Poetry Review

say a body

Cordite Poetry Review, Issue 88: TRANSQUEER (2018)

say a body with the mouth?
2018 Axon: Creative Explorations

Vocal Womb and the Ekphrasis Machine (we die)

with Q. Eades

Axon: Creative Explorations, 8 no. 1 (2018)

The text ‘Vocal Womb’ and the ekphrasis machine (we die) was the result of Barratt and Eades writing with and to the live arias in a constraint-based processual performance. In a dialogic relationship to the poem/arias, we were sensing the vitalities of the iterative always-becoming text, and coaxing out the new emergent poetics, feeding back in a spiralling exchange with our poems, and mining the remainder for the refrain.
2016 Writing From Below

Monstering the Logos Eros

Writing From Below: Contamination From Above, 2 no. 2 (2016)

Reflecting on human fragility, vulnerability, and intimate connection.

2016 Writing From Below

SkipToEnd

Writing From Below: Contamination From Above, 2 no. 2 (2016)

Exploring archival practices and memory preservation.

2015 Spheres Journal

Hexing the Alien

with Francesca da Rimini

Spheres Journal for Digital Cultures, Ecologies of Change, No. 2 (2015)

Science fiction, VNS Matrix, and hybrid creatures — cyberfeminism and cyborg subjectivity.