æmæra, 2025

Site-specific work for the Bradley Building outdoor screens, North Terrace, Adelaide.

1min 30seconds

æmæra is site-specific video work, adhering to three vertical bands of colour, pattern, and pulse situated on the façade of the Bradley Building. Each band moves to its own rhythm — at times out of sync, in moments of brief alignment, then back into dissonance. I was interested in how these shifting relationships could form a kind of surface behaviour: a choreography of instability, rhythm and pause, where image becomes skin rather than screen.

The work grew from my ongoing fascination with oceanic communication — the way certain creatures seem to think through their surfaces. Chromatophores, drawn open and closed by fine muscular control, send waves of pigment across the body; cuttlefish ripple through camouflage and display; nudibranchs carry their signals openly in brilliant ornament. These gestures suggest systems of language that operate beyond human comprehension. In æmæra, this idea is translated into digital light — LCD pixels acting as speculative chromatophores, flickering with unfamiliar intent.

As with earlier works like aeolidida (Adelaide Festival Centre, 2023–25) and cnidølysis noeëidolon (FUMA, 2025), the process sits between making and facilitating — letting materials, systems, and chance take their own course. AI was used here not as a generator of results but as a collaborator in opening up unexpected visual terrain. The resulting imagery feels somewhere between natural and artificial, recognisable yet not entirely of this world.

Installed on a building devoted to research and data, the work plays against the stability of that context. It operates as a slow, uncertain skin — one that flickers, adapts, and never quite resolves.