Melinda Rackham is an artist and theorist who has been working online since the mid 1990s in her domain www.subtle.net. Her web practice has investigated the technological and psychological aspects of online identity, locality, sexuality and community, as well as viral symbiosis and trans species relations. She has just completed her PhD on the nature and construction of spaces and avatars within Virtual Reality Networked Environments at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia.

Rackham's writing appears online and in print in arenas like Ctheory, Culture Machine, Leonardo, and Realtime. Conference presentations include Contagion in Australia, Invencao in Brazil, and Consciousness Reframed in Wales. She has participated in residencies at Polar Circuit in Finland and Discovery at Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Her award winning web works have been shown in Beyond Interface, Arco Electronico, Transmediale, File, Art Entertainment Network, The Montreal Biennale, European Media Art Festival, Hybrid Life Forms, Biennial of Buenos Aires, lab3D and ISEA.

Rackham received the SoundSpace Award for Virtual Worlds at the 2001. Stuttgart Filmwinter, and the Faulding Award for Multimedia at the 2000 Adelaide Festival.

She was the first Curator of Networked Media at the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and in 2002 she established -empyre-, one of the world’s leading online critical media art theory forums.

She was Director of Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) from 2005 till 2009 where she forged significant industry partnerships and encouraged the critique of research and practice in art, science and new technologies. 

Currently Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Rackham’s focus is curating and writing on emerging art and cultures and their impact on our everyday lives.