Bodies in space: XR documentary in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses a selection of interactive and immersive works from the past twenty years in Australia and argues that these have emerged from a specific cultural and geographical perspective in relation to space and place. In the context of settler colonial or migrant Australians, who have fraught and unresolved relationships to place, technologies that intervene with and implicate the audience can further expand documentary's capacity to frame, interpret and challenge these relationships. In this article, we discuss five specific interactive and immersive Australian documentary works. Each of these projects re-frames an encounter with space and place through the methods by which the participant-as-audience is situated in relation to the subject matter and virtual environment. The article explores the controversial asylum-seeker documentary game, Escape From Woomera ([2003]. Australia: EFW Collective); Lynette Wallworth's Collisions which recounts the atomic bomb testing in the desert (2012); Oscar Raby's examination of history, identity and witnessing, Assent (2013); Joan Ross's examination of the colonial relationship to the environment in Did you ask the river? (2019) and Tyson Mowarin's VR of the Ngarluma people of North Western Australia and the threats to their culture and land in the VR work Thalu: Dreamtime is Now (2018).