We are drawn to projects that explore new forms, resist easy names,
unfold over time or move through places and communities.
We believe that ideas which first appear impossible or absurd often become the most powerful art. Context is everything. With the right people, place, time and conditions, an unusual proposition can discover its own logic and develop into something significant.
These projects rarely fit neatly within funding cycles, conventional presentation formats or standard commissioning models. Strange Engine creates a structure around each one, bringing together a mix of time, space, money, producing, dramaturgy, technical development, fundraising, introductions and partnerships.
We make and commission work, produce alongside artists and join projects at critical moments. The approach changes because the work changes.
Recently we have offered transcendence in an underground bunker, brought bass to the masses, gathered gossip and celebrated small towns through years of tiny rituals.
Strange Engine is a philanthropic organisation that offers artists: ideas, people, time and energy - the ways and means of making interesting things happen.
Strange Engine is a not-for-profit production platform based in Naarm/Melbourne.
We make, produce and support ambitious art that requires a unique approach.
Diagrammatica, film still, 2025
The People:
Strange Engine is run by Jason Maling, Anna Schoo and Martyn Coutts. Three artists with decades of experience, making, producing and performing in projects across Australia and around the world.
We’ve worked with big festivals, major galleries and in all sorts of public sites. Long-form, community focused, big scale and small scale - always traversing the blurry line between multiple disciplines.
Strange Engine grew from Field Theory, the award winning Melbourne live art collective active from 2009 to 2019. Field Theory created radical platforms for public encounter, dialogue and exchange, creating projects in markets, stadiums, airports and shopping centers - spaces where art does not usually behave as expected.
These projects rarely came with a ready-made production model. The group learned to invent methods, build relationships and change roles as the work developed.
Strange Engine grows from that shared experience. It builds on a network of collaborators and presentation partners collected over many years and carries that inventive spirit into a focused model of production and artist support.
[02] Anna Schoo
Coordinates the people, resources, partnerships and production structures around the work.
Anna is a producer and arts professional who moves confidently between experimental practice, major festivals and city-wide public events. Her credits include White Night Melbourne, Melbourne Festival, Dark Mofo, Adelaide Fringe, the City of Melbourne, The School of Life Australia and The Wired Lab, where she was Creative Producer from 2017 to 2024. Anna gives complex projects the structure and momentum they need while protecting the qualities that make them unusual.
Start a Conversation
/ Driver
We don’t have application rounds or a fixed programme. Projects develop through curiosity, serendipity and ongoing relationships.
Artists, presenters, funders and organisations with something compelling, difficult, unfinished or usefully strange are welcome to say hello.
The Works:
[01] Jason Maling
Initiates projects, sets the artistic direction and keeps things rolling.
Jason is an Aotearoa-born, Naarm-based interdisciplinary artist working across live performance, sculpture, social practice and experimental public art. For more than 30 years, he has created situations that invite people to gather, play and make meaning together.
His projects have unfolded in unusual public sites across Australia and in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Germany and Japan. Often developed with artists and communities, his work has been presented at RISING, Melbourne Festival, Aichi Triennale, ACCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and City Gallery Wellington.
Jason’s long-running collaboration with Back to Back Theatre produced We Did Die Laughing and Single Channel Video. As a founding member of Field Theory, he shared the 2020 Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture. His recent work Diagrammatica, presented by Strange Engine with Fed Square and RISING, won the 2026 Green Room Award for Outstanding Work in Contemporary and Experimental Performance.Jason often begins with a place, a question or an unusual invitation, then assembles the people, objects and ideas needed to build a world around it.
/ Engineer
/ Signals
Reads what the work is doing, tests its form and connects its artistic, dramaturgical and technical elements.
Martyn is an artist, dramaturg and award-winning video designer working across performance, digital media and participatory practice. His projects and collaborations have appeared at Melbourne Festival, Perth International Arts Festival, Mona Foma, Dance Massive, Ten Days on the Island and Festival of Live Art, and have toured across Asia, Europe and North America. He is the founding lecturer in Digital Media and Projection at the Victorian College of the Arts. Martyn brings artistic and technical thinking together, helping complex work remain coherent, responsive and alive.
[03] Martyn Coutts
Red Chair / Strange Engine / Field Theory / Sunshine Coast Council / Queensland Government through Arts Queensland / Regional Arts Development Fund / Australian Government through Creative Australia / Sunshine Coast Arts Foundation and project donors
Partners + Funders + Supporters