Multitudes 🦑🌕👾

“Our survival on this planet depends on fostering a greater sense of connection to the living world, and wonderment is key to forging that link.” —Dr. Edith Widder, Marine Biologists

Commissioned for RISING Festival in Melbourne, Multitudes re-imagines the Kings Domain Gardens as a biosphere inhabited by newly imagined lifeforms.

Inspired by deep-sea ecosystems, this immersive installation features thirteen larger-than-life sculptures and an epic new digital work spread across fifteen LED screens and projection mapped onto the Sidney Myer Music Bowl canopy. A custom-built generative system shows the lifeforms living, dying, and evolving in real-time across the digital surfaces.

Multitudes delves into hybridity, contact zones and the intimate relationships between living things. Are these lifeforms many or a connected whole? Through their morphology, color, pattern, and their relationship to the environment and each other, what can we learn about their lives? Are these creatures friendly or threatening? Is this encounter a communion, a confrontation, or both? In these chaotic times, how do these binaries coexist?

RISING is a surge of art, music, performance and ceremony in the heart of Melbourne - a new festival in Victoria's cultural calendar.