Lead Artist: James McMillan
Mentor: Poppy van Oorde-Grainger
Project: Deep Map Cruising
James McMillan’s protoype was a locative, audio AR work that explored male same-sex cruising across Boorloo beat sites, challenging and reframing the narratives often associated with cruising.
Deep Map Cruising seeps into your daily routine, enticing you to an undisclosed site where you pursue your own location dependent desires and understandings. As you move through trigger fields of light and sound, the landscape becomes a playground of potential as the digital folds into the real.
Since the advent of ‘hookup’ apps and websites, people have been cruising online with a suite of potential intimate partners produced depending on location, providing a navigable map of desire and connection. Here the idea works in the same way, digitally rendering a beat in which to cruise hidden histories, participate as a cruiser and navigate surveillant or outside interferences, providing a key into the spatial practices unique to cruising.
Deep Map Cruising looks to challenge and reframe narratives often associated with cruising, conceptually and aesthetically restructuring and reconceiving the layering of intimacies to map and digitally augment a proposed liberated and joyous future.
James worked with the industry mentor Poppy van Oorde-Grainger, technical artist Kim Smith and sound artist Tao Issario. This project is a part of PhD research being conducted at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University and is supported by the Commonwealth through an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
James McMillan is a WA-based performance maker. He is currently completing a PhD at WAAPA researching the socio-spatial dynamics of local cruising sites through performance, deep mapping and audio augmented reality. Recently McMillan undertook a 6-week residency through the City of Albany developing locative sound work Out Here, was an artist in the 2024 Perth Festival Lab and co-created Mi-Meme a part of the 2023 Prague Quadrennial.
Poppy van Oorde-Grainger is a visual artist, filmmaker and founding director of not-for-profit production company Same Drum. She has 20 years experience collaborating with communities on art and film projects with a social impact. Poppy first gained national recognition as winner of the Fremantle Print Award and later the Australia Council Kirk Robson Award for leadership in community arts and cultural development. Projects Poppy has written, directed and produced include Galup (Perth Festival, 2021), Two Sands (SBS, 2022), Ngaluk Waangkiny (ABC, 2022) and Galup VR Experience (Slamdance, 2023).
Kim Smith is a technical artist and software developer based in Boorloo/Perth and the founder and general manager of the games studio, GamesSmiths. Influenced by magic realism and fantasy horror, Kim’s practice extends the everyday into the cyber-verse through the creation of mixed reality experiences. He was the mixed reality developer on BoodjAR for the 10 Nights in Port Festival (2024), collaborating with Voyant AR Director Natalie Marinho and other developers to augment reality with ‘katadjin’ shared by Wadjuk Elders. Kim also served as technical artist on Nazerul Ben-Dzulkefli’s Trans-Oceanic Spectres (2022) during PICA’s Hackathon. His work with Perth-based software company Sentient has been implemented across Western Australia in VR training environments, improving safety and accessibility on mine sites and contributing to the reduction of human error and fatalities.
Tao Issaro is an Indian/Australian multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound designer and performance maker based in Boorloo, WA. As a composer/sound designer in Australia Tao has worked for Encounter Theatre, Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, Tura New Music and Ochre Contemporary Dance Company to name a few. In 2024 Tao was nominated for 2 PAWA awards for outstanding composition and sound design for his work on Encounter Theatre’s Beneath The Music. As a performer he is currently working with Sensorium Theatre providing bespoke sensory theatrical experiences for neuro-diverse children in schools across Perth. Tao also works as Captain Starlight at the Perth Children’s Hospital, providing a playful and creative environment, supporting sick kids to cope with the uncertainty and worry of hospitals and treatments. In 2025 Tao won the Fringe World Weekly Award for music and musicals with Boorloo based pop outfit Tab Family, as well as winning WAM’s Song of the Year in the global category with his group Tchega.
Images: James McMillan, Deep Map Cruising, 2026, boorda yeyi Intensive Mentorship Open Studio, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Photos: Olivia Pizzale-Bryce.
