STUART BENDER MICK BRODERICK

STUART BENDER & MICK BRODERICK WAVELENGTH

Images from Stuart Bender & Mick Broderick, Wavelength, Technical support: 3D Modelling and VR Coding by Wesley Lamont, 2022 | Interactive Virtual Reality

Wavelength uses the novel medium of immersive Virtual Reality to challenge the viewer’s notions of the future of energy and its impact on everyday life. It explores the theme of water-powered energy production, but in doing so the experience activates the viewer’s imaginative capacity to wonder how life can be positively impacted by the opportunities afforded by natural energy production. Australia boasts 34,000 kms of coastline, with wave swell capable of generating much of its energy needs. The technology to do so already exists, enabling us to imagine a future in which any coastal town or city can harness the natural environment’s opportunity for power generation from ocean waves. Virtually transporting the viewer into an interactive scenario that takes place 30 years in the future, Wavelength is an immersive Virtual Reality presentation which invites the audience to step inside a fictional coastal town in the year 2050 to tour the water turbine facility generating the population’s entire power supply. At present, Australia’s population predominantly lives by the coast and over the coming decades the nation must confront the question of whether to expand housing vertically or horizontally. The electronic diegesis of Wavelength offers a vision of the future where it is possible for any community to live self-sufficiently. This prompts the audience to question the kind of future they would like to inhabit, and how this can be achieved using clean alternative modes of energy production that are afforded by the unique natural environment of Australia. Using a hybrid composition of 360-degree stereoscopic video augmented by advanced 3D modelling and water simulation, Wavelength represents an unique contribution to the Energaia exhibition by visualising one possible future of energy production. Its fictional scenario draws inspiration from present-day opportunities and technology, offering viewers the embodied experience of an imaginative, and above all positive, future. Stuart Bender is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. His work specialises in the aesthetics of high-emotion media, and his research has been published in numerous monographs, journal articles and book chapters. His creative media productions have been exhibited in national galleries and screened by invitation at international film festivals. Mick Broderick is Adjunct Professor of Media & Creative Arts at Curtin University, Adjunct Professor of Media & Communication at RMIT University and the 2021-22 Smithsonian Chair of Aerospace History at the US National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. He has produced over 100 scholarly outputs including research monographs, journal articles, book chapters, curated exhibitions, artworks and digital media productions.