Virtual Reality brings Venice Biennale installation Living Rocks to SALA Festival in Adelaide
SALA Festival visitors can be transported to Venice to experience a South Australian art installation through virtual reality.
A touch of the Venice Biennale comes to Adelaide in this year’s SALA Festival with the return of James Darling and Lesley Forwood’s installation Living Rocks: A Fragment of the Universe – albeit in virtual reality form.
Art Gallery patrons will be able to visit The Chapel at Lot Fourteen, the former RAH site, and don VR goggles to be visually transported inside the installation at Venice’s historic stone salt storehouses, the Magazzini del Sale.
The installation in Venice, which runs until the end of November, has been averaging around 500 visitors a day and is one of only 21 official “collateral events” at the 58th Biennale.
Double the scale of the original Living Rocks installation, first shown at Hugo Michell Gallery last year, the Venice version features a 30-metre wide pool from which emerge thrombolites – round, sedimentary structures formed by microorganisms in shallow waters.
The thrombolites have been recreated by Darling and Forwood using three tonnes of mallee roots shipped from their farm at Keith in the state’s southeast.
“It is a memory of our origin and a prophecy of our future,” says Darling.
When government policy demanded clearance of native vegetation for agricultural land, the pair responded by conserving the roots of the mallee gum to make art. Since the 1990s they have been making large installations that celebrate the whorl and the helix of the eucalypt roots.
The Living Rocks installation features moving screen images made in collaboration with Jumpgate VR, which has also helped create the new virtual reality version, and is accompanied by the Australian String Quartet’s performance of Paul Stanhope’s String Quartet No 2.
Living Rocks VR is at The Chapel, Lot Fourteen (entry via Gate 7, Frome Rd), Monday-Friday, 10am-3pm from August 5-30.