ANTÁRTICA: Antarctic Artists

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. The pair are the latest in a long line of artists who have been inspired by the icy continent.

Take a virtual voyage south

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.

Australian Antartic Division