The Very Near Future is a large scale architectural installation in which multiple parallel realities are gradually revealed as the audience explores the environment.
Unlike a conventional mediated experience, which relies on the suspension of disbelief, in this work audience members are led to believe that certain events are actually occurring live within the space; that they have unexpectedly stepped inside an active film set. Rather than being positioned as passive observers, audience members become intrinsic to the narrative as the environment dynamically responds to their presence. The experience is constructed through a series of cascading illusions, each revealing an alternate reality resulting in shifting interpretations of events as they transpire.
What is real or virtual, fact or fiction? In the simplest of terms, the experience of the work is that the audience is told a story, and the story comes alive around them as it is being told.
After entering the installation, audience members stumble across a film noir production that is being shot live within a series of sets located throughout the space. In the midst of production, a catastrophic environmental event occurs causing a fracture in space-time. Distortions of time and space are represented through complex media illusions and architecture.
The work describes a multiverse. When the space-time glitches occur, the parallel universes spiral out from the epicenter, suddenly disappearing when time is truncated back to the start and the cycle begins afresh.

Exhibitions

• Sydney Festival, Artspace, Sydney Australia, 2014
• International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2013 ) Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia, 2013

Credits

• This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
• Cinematography: Alex Davies, Greg Ferris, Alex Ryan
• Script Consultants: Joe Velikovsky, Chris Caines
• Film Noir Script: Joe Velikovsky, Alex Davies
• Sound: Alex Davies, Brendan Lloyd
• Actors: Steve Rodgers, Veronica Sywak, Matthew Prest, Mark Simpson, Annabel Lines, Greg Ferris, Rebecca Conroy, Damian Martin, Brendan Lloyd, Pete Manwaring, Andrew Maher, Monica Brooks
• Construction/ Fabrication: Ed Horne, Brendan Lloyd, Leigh Russell, Mark Swartz, Alex Davies
• Special thanks to Brendan Lloyd
• Thanks to: Alexandra Crosby, Kathryn Davies, Michaela Davies, Phil Young, Celia Curtis, Monica Brooks, Martin Crouch, Julianne Pierce, Adam Mada, Aaron Clark, Andrew Traukie, James Hurley, Chris Fox, Chas Glover, Christian Heinrich, Justin Maynard, Alex Holver, James Hancock, Mark Mitchell, UTS Media Center, Erth,CMAI, Paul Greedy and Artspace.