KEYNOTE: "Mixtape: Making Do with Games, Soundtracks, and Screen Studies"
Description
Please join us for the keynote address from Professor Golding (Monash), as part of the Biennial Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (SSAAANZ) Conference 2026.
The talk is free to attend, but registration is essential.
NB. Conference delegates do not need to register again.
Abstract
The 2026 Melbourne-made videogame Mixtape (Beethoven & Dinosaur) plays with form, medium, nostalgia, and tradition, and presents an interesting problem for screen studies. A game about a girl who dreams of becoming a Hollywood music supervisor, Mixtape is a deliberately romantic homage to the movies and to their soundtracks. It is one of Australia’s most popular cultural exports of this year, as well as one funded by a state screen funding agency. Featuring stepped animation, live action photography, head banging to Silverchair, and gamer conspiracy theories about Megan Ellison and Annapurna Pictures, Mixtape was viewed with unreasonable suspicion by some as being “too cinematic” to be praised as a game.
While it’s true that “almost all ‘from…to’ histories” are “deeply flawed” (Elsaesser, 2005), screen studies as an academic paradigm also happens to be about as old (or new) as the videogame medium. How games are contemplated by screen studies as a discipline, however, is not straightforward. Scholars interested in games have found, particularly in Australia, a basis for enquiry in screen studies and have built critical research on games in part on the foundations provided by screen studies. Making do, like the practices of De Certeau’s everyday agents, game researchers have imperfectly improvised ways to enact screen studies in other contexts, or perhaps to bring other contexts to screen studies. In the context of Mixtape, there’s also an opportunity to consider soundtracks and film music: a “composite discipline” (Audissino, 2017) founded within, but not led by film scholarship.
In an era of “media collapse” and commensurability prompted by generative AI (Impett and Offert, 2026), this talk offers some ideas for thinking through the relationship between screen studies in Australia and its own mixtaped codas – games, soundtracks. It aims to consider how we can make do with disciplines and tradition.
Speaker Bio
Professor Dan Golding
Professor of Media and Head of Media Section at Monash University, the host of Screen Sounds on ABC Classic, and an award-winning composer and writer. Dan is the author of Star Wars After Lucas (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and with Leena van Deventer the co-author of Game Changers (Affirm Press, 2016). He also created the soundtrack for the BAFTA, DICE, and GDCA winning Untitled Goose Game (2019), which became the first game soundtrack to be nominated for an ARIA award in history, along with multiple other highly esteemed compositions for games, screen and podcasts. Dan co-hosts the popular film music podcast Art of the Score, and in 2018, presented What Is Music for ABC iView and Triple J with Linda Marigliano. He regularly hosts events and concerts, and has worked with every major Australian symphony orchestra to present to audiences in their thousands at the Sydney Opera House, Hamer Hall, and the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. For fifteen years Dan has written journalism and commentary for a wide variety of publications, is a video essayist, and was director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival (2014-2017).
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