Project Leads: David Haines and Joyce Hinterding

Dr David Haines art practice is internationally renowned and at the forefront of exploring the broader concept of Energies, spanning a wide variety of media, from large scale projection, installation and experimental audio to discrete objects, images, and aroma compositions. He is known for producing technologically innovative works that combine extensive photographic and video fieldwork with real-time interactive 3d environments and often collaborates with artist Joyce Hinterding.

Commissioned by the Wired Lab in 2021, Telepathy Muttuma (currently under construction) will become a permanent outdoor installation within a dedicated sound precinct in the Eastern Riverina Region in the small village of Muttuma in NSW. The Wired Lab is currently redeveloping the deconsecrated Church of the Immaculate Conception in Muttama, transforming it into a cultural destination that is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Once open and featuring a new decolonised name, ‘The Church’ will facilitate community activities and provide access to deep listening arts experiences by internationally renowned artists. 

The site will feature ‘Telepathy’, a permanently installed, purpose-built anechoic chamber by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. A freestanding sculptural building designed by the artists, people will be able to experience a profound level of silence inside a black and yellow cave like interior of anechoic pyramids that transduce sound into heat.  A ‘Wiradjuri Yarning Circle’ will be located at the heart of the site, along with an ‘ambisonic’ sound array of commissioned listening experiences in the original nave. A new adjoining building provides accommodation for resident artists and visitors. Telepathy is a longstanding project by the artists that began in 2008, the gallery based version was originally commissioned and exhibited  by Carriageworks, Sydney, it was then installed in the MCA Sydney in 2015, in the survey exhibition Energies:Haines and Hinterding and was included in Energies, Vibrations of the Pacific, Los Angeles, USA, 2024, funded by the Getty Foundation.

Project Lead: Professor Julie Rrap

For more than 40 years I have made work around representations of the body (my body) which has challenged and questioned traditional expressions most particularly of the female body throughout western art history. This journey has encompassed many different approaches,and utilised a variety of different materials.

It has also mapped a body over time as my own body has performed photographically, sculpturally and through moving image since my first exhibition Disclosures in 1982 which is in the collection of the MCA, Sydney.

Disclosures incorporated photography and performance as a way to expose the visual manipulation and excess of imagery in both popular media and western art history in which the youthful female body is both exploited and sexualised. The camera as a voyeuristic tool played a strong role in “disclosing” this ‘excess of visibility’ to the viewer.

My body represented in Disclosures is now 40 years older and as a subject creates a very interesting perspective from which to reflect on the body through time. In contrast to the younger female body, the aging female body is virtually “invisible” within representational history and popular culture.

Using Photography, drawing, video and sculpture, the program of research and new work I created for the exhibition Past Continuous took as a starting point this ongoing exploration of the body (my body) but focused on a body impacted by time in which its materiality speaks to the human condition in all its vulnerability and strength.

Project Lead: Dr Yvette Hamilton

Funding and support: SSSHARC Research Impact Accelerator (RIA)

Imaging sustainability: Embodied experiments in art and science combines visual arts practices and science to empower individuals to make more sustainable choices within analogue photography processes. By trialling lower-toxicity chemical processes that utilize botanicals, the team will examine sustainability in image making through a collaboration with 'The Darkroom Social' a social enterprise launched by Remi Siciliano (HDR student) & Isobel Markus-Dunworth. This project aims to foster a tangible connection to the often-abstract concept of sustainability through creative and practical engagement.

This project is led by Dr Yvette Hamilton (SACE) and includes SCA colleagues Isobel Markus-Dunworth and Alexander Yuen from the School of Chemistry.

This project ties into my ongoing investigation into photographic ontology and methodology through material experimentation within the photographic medium referencing its past to present, and potential futures.

Project Lead: Rebecca Beardmore

Funding and support: SACE Research Support Scheme

An accomplished print-based artist, Rebecca is particularly invested in the material properties that print affords to the photographic image. Her research examines the relationship between the photographic and the reprographic, focusing on the material means by which photographic artworks communicate and exist in the world. Through an innovative and experimental approach to materials and techniques, Rebecca seeks to expand the rhetoric around image perception and disrupt the image as an object of representation— evoking tensions between reading, seeing and perception.

Cloud Matter combines photographic cloudscapes and amorphous blots of colour printed onto mirrored architectural surfaces, reflecting the viewer within. The combination produces a perceptual interplay that shifts with the ambient light and viewing angle, fusing an image of the self with the experience of the world that surrounds.

Project Leads: Dr Andrew Sully and Dr Wendy Chandler

Funding and support: SLAM Start-Up Fund, SLAM Research Support Scheme, SACE Research Support Scheme

The Spirits of Tasi Tolu, is a recently completed documentary investigating the impact of a controversial tourism development in Tasi Tolu, Timor-Leste. This area, just west of Dili, is a significant wetland and the site of extrajudicial executions and secret burials during the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999).

A government-approved resort by a Singaporean developer promises investment and jobs but threatens to displace thousands who rely on the land and lakes of Tasi Tolu for their livelihood.

Filmmakers Dr Andrew Sully and Dr Wendy Chandler, working closely with the residents of Tasi Tolu, foreground local beliefs in the continuing presence of the spirits of the dead. The film explores how these beliefs intersect with competing visions of community, identity, and development in Timor-Leste.

Project Lead: Robyn Backen

The series of artworks On the Precipice of Forgetting explores the fragile terrain of forgetting through sound, architecture, and immersive media. Set at the simulated South Australia’s Whispering Wall—a concrete dam famed for its acoustic resonance—the work combines VR, drone footage, and voice to examine how forgetting can shape our perception and communication. Voices drift across the dam and within a small hut below it. Fragmented conversations—some real, some AI translations—float in and out of coherence, inviting fantastical musings and misaligned exchanges.

This work draws on long-term research into acoustic architecture and the telephonic phenomenon of whispering spaces, merging it with an inquiry into why we forget and how that process distorts our embodied perceptions. Sound becomes a vehicle for absence and transformation, while the dam wall is both a container and amplifier, creating a site for lousiness.

The work speaks to larger questions about perception in the digital age, where information overwhelms and erodes, blurring the line between real and imagined. On the Precipice of Forgetting invites audiences to inhabit the space where forgetting takes form, breaks apart, and reconfigures languages of understanding. This work will be part of the SCA Gallery exhibition What Lies Beneath, curated by John Tonkin and Robyn Backen, from August to September 2025.

Project lead: Vicky Browne

Funding and support: Australian Council for the Arts and Museums and Galleries NSW. Exhibited at Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Verge Gallery, Murray Art Museum Albury, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, and Sydenham International.

Browne’s ongoing project Cosmic Noise (2017–) spans the vastness of space and the infinitesimal scale of microcosms to explore our embeddedness within technology, material, and ecologies. The work draws on early visions of cosmic interconnectedness—from 1960s counterculture and The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” to the iconic Whole Earth Catalog—while interrogating who or what holds agency in today’s techno-ecological systems.

Through sound-based sculptural works, DIY electronics, levitating lint, and resonant stones, Cosmic Noise evokes the strangeness and intimacy of planetary materiality. Browne playfully and critically reflects on power, presence, and the “thingy-ness” of things, suggesting that we are, still, made of stars—yet tangled in complex, vibrating entanglements far closer to home.

Project Lead: Dr Anna Broinowski                                                                                 

Funding and support: SSSHARC Research Huddle Scheme, SACE Research Support Scheme

Dr Anna Broinowski is a filmmaker, synthetic media researcher and author who uses innovative technologies and narrative modes to document counter-cultural subjects.

A senior lecturer in the Master of Film and Screen Arts at SCA, Anna researches Gen-AI screen technologies and political deepfakes.

Her current film project is Moonshot, a cli-fi mockumentary incorporating human and synthetic characters and landscapes.

Project Lead: John Tonkin

Projections is part of a series of VR projects that investigate the interrelationship between anxiety, panic and space.

The work extends Tonkin’s ongoing research into the relationship between the body, movement, and vision, to consider how anxiety influences both how we perceive our surroundings as well as our embodied first-person experience of being a body.

Projections is informed by the perceptual theories of James J Gibson that focused on ideas of the optic array and optical flow that are formed as we move through the world, and the stop motion works of experimental Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito (eg Ghost 1984) that consist of sequences of images that were projected into architectural spaces and rephotographed frame-by-frame as the camera was moved through the space.

Both of these examples involve projection and reprojection: a moving back and forth between two- and three-dimensional spaces. Projections has used several techniques (photogrammetry, camera mapping and 3D projection), to create a series of abstracted 3D spaces that activate memories / reflections around spatial anxiety.

While VR technology seems to materially manifest the notion of the disembodied Cartesian subject who inhabits a stable 3D space, these works seek to explore more ambiguous, haptic and sometimes disorientating approaches to working with VR.