FOR NIGH ON a decade, there was an email sitting in my inbox that I would intermittently forward to friends who were, like me, planning to travel to Japan. The email – consisting of places to visit, to eat and to rest – had been sent to me by a friend, though I never made the trip (burnout, terminal delays). The list’s author was the polymath Ross Gibson – author, filmmaker, educator – whom I never met in person, despite our timelines having crossed at the University of Technology Sydney, where he was Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture and I was an unbecoming undergraduate.

As a child, I had spent a year in Niigata, on the west coast of Honshu, attending Yōchien, the Japanese equivalent of kindergarten. I finally made my return trip to Japan in 2023, mounting a pilgrimage to Niigata and following Ross Gibson’s trail through Kyoto, a site he’d visited regularly. This sense of simultaneously communing with both Ross and my childhood in Japan was what subsequently started me collecting a set of DVDs for which Ross had recorded full-length ‘audio commentaries’. On his online CV, Ross itemised these commentaries alongside his many, many books, essays, articles, exhibitions and multimedia works (he was both theorist and practitioner). Yet DVD audio commentaries have long been seen as ancillary material. Quite literally: extras on the menu. Unlike Ross, few would have considered them serious works. Perhaps even less so now.