A Rising Tide

‘A Rising Tide’ is a creative practice research project that innovatively combines appropriated and custom-made visual and sonic elements, gig-economy labour, and video game engine software to animate a post-apocalyptic near-future of flooded cities and crumbling skyscrapers. While the familiarly cinematic scene acts as a poetic expression of climate anxiety, the bricoleur-animation methods it develops also demonstrate emerging ways to draw upon the collective unconscious of visual culture to critique our position amongst a present climate crisis. Produced within the same structures of capitalism that the animation’s voiceover warns against, the work also cynically suggests an uneasy sense of shared complicity in how the past and present creates this potential future.

The current climate crisis has been explored by myriad contemporary artists nationally and internationally across all media, but few have used emerging moving image technologies to create animations that depict the potential dystopian future. Similarly, while the fields of animation and film use cutting-edge video-game engines like Unreal Engine, only a few contemporary artists including Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Ed Atkins, and Grant Stevens are currently exploring the creative possibilities of these technologies. This project combines these two trajectories of enquiry to create a major large-scale video installation.

The artwork formed part of a competitive Australia Council grant. It was selected as a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Art Prize, a $100,00 acquisitive art prize held by the Art Gallery of South Australia where it was exhibited from 22 May - 22 Aug 2021. The work was selected by a judging panel of contemporary art specialists comprised of Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Director of Programs at Carriageworks and Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design at AGSA. AGSA reported the exhibition received 41,424 visitors and was the subject of 261 media items that reached a cumulative audience of over 9 million people nationally. The work was the centrepiece of the major solo exhibition ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’ in partnership with Milani Gallery and Brisbane City Council, and was reviewed by Pamela See in ArtsHub.