{"id":351613,"date":"2025-08-17T12:31:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T12:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/351613\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T12:31:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T12:31:15","slug":"imagine-your-house-under-water-this-vr-film-takes-us-inside-the-flood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/351613\/","title":{"rendered":"Imagine your house under water. This VR film takes us inside the flood"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On a sunny midwinter day I venture to a creekside studio in inner-city Melbourne to find out what a flood feels like. I\u2019m a VR virgin, except for that time I found myself staring at simulated Roman ruins in my cousin\u2019s loungeroom. That world was still in development but the one I\u2019m about to experience is a fully formed work by artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine that is about to have its world premiere.<\/p>\n

The World Came Flooding In has been several years in the making, off and on \u2013 Knowles tells me the pair work in bursts, juggling commissions and projects at different stages of development. A brief survey of their output shows a creative repertoire that encompasses film, design, writing, puppetry, photography: much \u201cmaking\u201d. Whatever the form, a reverence for quirk and personal detail shines through.<\/p>\n

The World Came Flooding In can be a cinematic experience, or fully interactive. It uses cardboard miniatures, sound and story to relate the experience of flood-affected people. Knowles and Sowerwine\u2019s aim was to make something \u201ca little bit magical or wondrous\u201d from this difficult material. If the work is an invitation to share in \u201csolastalgia\u201d \u2013 distress caused by environmental change \u2013 this tension is tempered. Here, the warmth of handmade blends with the \u201ccool\u201d of technology to make something vivid and moving.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The World Came Flooding In uses cardboard miniatures, sound and story to relate the experience of flood-affected people.<\/p>\n

Knowles and Sowerwine met when they were studying Media Arts at RMIT in the early 2000s. They started with short films (stop-motion animation, often featuring dolls and toys) before moving to interactive installations. Sowerwine talks of being drawn to the blurring of the physical space and the screen space.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made interactive works in a number of different forms, and then saw a VR work in 2016 and were blown away by the possibilities of full immersion. We\u2019ve always been techy, but we also like texture and real things and making the design process really tactile.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their augmented reality experience Night Creatures (2022), life-sized animated sartorial bats swoop down in a cinema queue to tell stories about movies, subculture and community. Their highly awarded VR film Passenger (2019) puts the player in the back seat of a taxi to explore migration and place-making.<\/p>\n

Sowerwine tracks the beginnings of The World Came Flooding In to their pandemic project Can\u2019t Do Without You (2021), where they recreated their lockdown spaces in miniature.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe experience was really moving for us. It started us thinking about stories where the transformation of space is really dramatic, and we\u2019d just gone through a year of being followed around by floods. We wanted to make something about the climate, but we didn\u2019t want to be super-didactic. It was just what was in our world at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2022 floods across eastern Australia made the climate emergency more visible than ever. Knowles and Sowerwine had friends living in disaster zones and had themselves gone through the panic of evacuation. One of the seeds of the project was a series of community art workshops the pair facilitated in Lismore with people who\u2019d been affected by the floods. From there the project grew. They found subjects to interview and the world of World began to find form.<\/p>\n

\"Isobel<\/p>\n

Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine created three pre-flooded homes, which they then immersed in murky water.Credit: Eddie Jim<\/p>\n

They made the miniatures over many months, and built the world with photogrammetry, a technique that creates 3D models and environments by analysing multiple images and seeking common \u201ctie-points\u201d. While many artists seek perfect replication, the rendering of Knowles and Sowerwine\u2019s world has gaps. For the artists, this reflects the imprecision and fallibility of memory. \u201cWe loved the imperfections,\u201d Knowles says. \u201cIt\u2019s like [the scanner] can\u2019t remember what it\u2019s looked at \u2026 [our subjects] can\u2019t remember their homes completely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019ve come to the part where I try and write about the experience without spoilers. I step into a marked-out area, put on the VR goggles and find myself in a space that seems boundless. In this inky sea there are structures: rooms and objects. I can\u2019t gauge distances \u2013 things feel at once far away and close to hand. I\u2019m holding a remote control and taking instruction and my first tentative steps. I\u2019ve read that some people feel dizzy using VR, but at most I feel a little destabilised, off-kilter. As I relax and move around more, this feeling goes away. I can teleport to places and different vantages. I can even pick things up.<\/p>\n

Loading<\/p>\n

In this world, the rain never stops falling. Other people\u2019s memories are made manifest. I walk around in them. From the balcony of Tom\u2019s apartment I watch the rain sheet down while the floodwaters rise and white goods float by. At Marina\u2019s house in Maribyrnong, green parrots fly above my head, past punk records and family portraits. Here the waters have subsided but left an indelible mark; in Antoinette\u2019s warehouse the flood arrives almost gently, mirroring the surrounds, before rising, roaring, bringing down whatever it can.<\/p>\n

I lose track of time, and I also lose myself. The storytelling is direct and personable, and the wonky approximations of rooms and objects (wardrobes, chairs, pianos) enhance the feeling of intimacy. Near the end I find myself facing a sea of displaced possessions. I stand by each to hear their stories. The voices here have some distance from catastrophe; the tone is one of acceptance and memorial; goodbye to all that. When I take the goggles off, I feel emotional, disquieted, stunned and teary. Like I\u2019ve been through something.<\/p>\n

\"Isobel<\/p>\n

Isobel Knowles, left, and Van Sowerwine peer through the windows of one of their house models.Credit: Eddie Jim<\/p>\n

In a 2015 TED talk, VR filmmaker Chris Milk declared VR the \u201cultimate empathy machine\u201d: \u201cIt connects humans to other humans in a profound way.\u201d The World Came Flooding In is made from cardboard, hot glue and memory. It shows how we construct our lives and identities through place and objects. We think of home as somewhere fixed and stable. Safe as houses, the saying goes, but what does this mean when we are displaced? In the aftermath of disaster, where and how do we find ourselves? For the subjects in Knowles and Sowerwine\u2019s work, creative acts of remembrance are a step towards healing.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn Lismore, we had heard from people up the hill from where it happened,\u201d Sowerwine says. \u201cThey didn\u2019t really understand what the experience was like for people, how it is a traumatic thing to go through in your body.\u201d As part of their testing and working through World, they showed the prototype to people who\u2019d lived through their experience \u2013 \u201con their request!\u201d Knowles assures me.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were like \u2018wow, amazing. That\u2019s exactly what it was like\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sowerwine adds: \u201cWe very much designed this to be an experience for everyone – even my 80-plus mother can do it. And in the writing, we\u2019re talking about floods, but there\u2019s a certain forward movement and positivity to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is only when I\u2019m driving home that I remember my own close call in country Victoria, the Sharpie line a friend drew on her wall labelled \u201ctidemark\u201d after the creek had breached its banks and so rudely entered her house. Like drawing the kids\u2019 heights on a door frame, or, no, not like that, more a kind of proof, a distinction that there was a time before and a time after, that time keeps moving and it\u2019s better for us if we can bring ourselves to move with it.<\/p>\n

The World Came Flooding In is at ACMI, August 21-24, every 30 minutes from noon to 8pm, as part of MIFF and Now or Never; miff.com.au; nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size On a sunny midwinter day I venture to a creekside…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3162],"tags":[53,16,15,3243,3244],"class_list":{"0":"post-351613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-virtual-reality","12":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115044121828468565","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}