Immersive Interfaces

Full description

Background
The metaphors we use to understand the digital tend towards the immaterial - clouds, webs, nets and ethers. Arguably, this language makes it difficult to locate the affective forces of digital artefacts in everyday life. Through my creative work, I have been exploring other metaphors and models for presenting the digital as a material so that we can locate it affectively both in the design process and within lived experience. This thinking activates an understanding that even though they cannot be touched, digital materials are active materials in the world that are tangled up with other things and processes, and this produces different effects like relations and atmospheres.

Contribution
Immersive Interfaces is a creative practice project that has produced 3 large format facade prints that have been installed on facades in public spaces in Melbourne and Brisbane. The 2 Melbourne prints measured 4m x 2.5m and the Brisbane print design measured 36m x 11m across a series of 7 panels. The works attempt to reconceptualise the digital as an affective force in the physical world through aesthetics and design: such as amplifying the scale of common digital materials and detritus, to make them enormous and exaggerate their material presence in the world. Producing these large format works has required the development of new processes for scaling up emoji and icons, as well as processes for proofing large prints remotely. The works emerge as giant screens, presenting unexpected materialties in urban space. They leverage the vernacular of the digital - glitch, emoji and icons - at unexpected scales in a gesture to their affective forces.

Significance
Two of these works were selected via peer review for printing and installation in the 2020 City of Melbourne Picture Windows commission, and installed at 133 Swanston St. The third was an invited commission from the University of Queensland Art Museum installed for 6 months on the facade of the building.