Maelstrom: Gazes into the digital abyss
Sean Pickersgill,  Gregory More,  John Power

Exhibition: Kaurna Gallery, 5th - 14th July, 2006, Adelaide.

"Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.”

The Descent into the Maelstrom, Edgar Allan Poe.

The work presented in Maelstrom collectively identifies and presents an exploration of digital space as a form of philosophical topology, a lens and a window onto an unknown world. The possibilities within the digital field have not yet begun to be understood in terms of the ontology of presence.  The work of the three artists seeks to give substance to some of the opportunities available within the immersive context of the first-person environment. Disruptions of form, aberrations of physics and geometry all present the fact that we can exist in these worlds within another gravitational logic.

Maelstrom presents the work of three architects and artists engaging the worlds of game environments. The projects combine art, architecture and interactivity through a mixture of digital prints, paintings, rapid prototype models and multi-user realtime environments (four terminal LAN). First-person perspective is used as a form of artistic inquiry, leading to a series of digital and physical artefacts that confound standard scopic regimes.

Support From:

University of South Australia, Adelaide.

Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL), School of Architecture + Design,

AIM (Animation and Interactive Media),