“A jaw-dropping feat” - The Guardian

“A love letter to the Daintree, but also a warning about its fragility.” - The Australian

A world-first multi-sensory installation distilling 100 years of climate data into a single day, this unique meditation on one of Australia’s richest ecosystems invites visitors to become lost in an evocative tribute to its lush foliage, light-streaked canopies, and forest floor teeming with life.

Fresh from screenings at SXSW, Sundance Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, co-creators Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts’ have developed a unique open-play environment inspired by five months of research spent off-grid and on the ground in the World Heritage-listed Daintree and surrounding Wet Tropics.

GONDWANA VR can be experienced through VR headsets that transport the user into an interactive digital forest, where you’ll encounter weather, seasons and biodiversity shifts as you navigate a vast map of ancient trees, rugged mountains, and idyllic beaches populated by rare birdlife.

With twin-tier ticketing, you can choose to slip on the VR headset and roam the digital forest, or simply explore the physical exhibition space – a tranquil experiment in multi-sensory place-making that expands the VR experience out of the headset with projection, lighting, and cinematic sound.

With each cycle showing different possible futures for the forest informed by climate projections up to the year 2090, visitors are drawn into a broader narrative that stirs below: the forest is deteriorating, and whether it survives or thrives hinges on how we interact with it. Do we ignore the effects of global heating on this haven of biodiversity, and let it bleach and wither? Or do we recognize the huge impacts our actions can have on our most irreplaceable ecological treasures?

Adelaide Festival 2024

Stay tuned for details of an epic 48-hour continuous cycle of GONDWANA VR from 8-10 of March as part of Adelaide Festival 2024, which will see the Museum open for 24-hours a day alongside a full weekend of public programming to be announced in 2024.

About the creators:

Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts are an artist duo based on Wathaurong country in regional Victoria. Their work integrates virtual reality within multi-sensory installations to create collective experiences that expand perceptions, reawaken curiosity and instill a sense of awe and wonder to the everyday.

The pair have created some of the largest location-based VR installations in Australia. Their work has shown at Sundance, SXSW, IDFA, MIT Open Documentary Lab, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Kunstahl Charlottenborg, and has won Best Interactive/Immersive at the Australian Director’s Guild awards and the Australian International Documentary Conference awards.