Take a virtual voyage south

30 September 2019 This article is over 5 years old

Arts Fellow retrospective

Video transcript

From the earliest expeditions, Antarctica has inspired artists.

Over four decades, our Antarctic Arts Fellowship has enabled many creative people to travel south.

Sculptors forming enduring monuments; authors creating much-loved stories;

Author, Alison Lester “I’m nine years old and I am going to Antarctica with my Dad. He’s the captain of the Aurora Australis. It’s an icebreaker, a ship that can go through ice.”

musicians composing unique melodies; and audio artists recording soundscapes from the frozen continent.

This summer, digital artists will travel to Antarctica.

They will digitally map the Aurora Australis and re-create the ship virtually to provide a life beyond its last voyage.

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As Australia’s icebreaker sails south next year, the sights, sounds and movement of the ship on the Southern Ocean will be captured and packaged into an immersive experience all can share.

Digital artists, Dr Adam Nash and Dr John McCormick, have been awarded the 2019/20 Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship. Together, they are known as Wild System and develop mixed reality art works and installation.

“We hope to capture the experience of being on the Aurora Australis and create an immersive, affecting work,” Dr Nash said.

“It is a lifelong dream to travel to Antarctica. We want to create a work that honours the spirit of those who have explored the world’s last great wilderness area,” Dr McCormick said.

The pair will travel to Antarctica on the RSV Aurora Australis in January next year to re-create a virtual representation of the ship and those who sail on it.

They will use cutting-edge technologies, such as drones, portable motion capture system, ambisonic recordings, LiDAR scanning and still, 360 and video cameras, to map the physical aspects of the voyage.

These recordings will be joined together into playable artworks for immersive experiences at galleries and festivals, and via mobile, gaming and virtual reality technology.

The project is supported by RMIT University School of Design and Swinburne University Centre for Transformative Media Technologies.

The Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship has been running since 1984 and is supported by the Australian Antarctic Division with support from the Australian Network for Art & Technology.

The next call for Expressions of Interest will be in March 2020.