ACMI + RMIT Audience Lab: March Expo 2024

Become a detective and delve into the depths of desire and motivation to solve the mystery of vanishing hikers in the Australian bush. Call of the Golden Valley sets you on an adventurous journey to follow clues, solve puzzles, dive into conspiracy theories, and find your missing friend. This thrilling story is an immersive escape into a true crime-like mystery.

In Generative Vision, you’ll see various examples of how generative AI can be used in visual journalism, from visualising a past or future context to illustrating news stories or assisting with brainstorming. You’ll be asked to rate how ethically acceptable each example is and provide feedback on your thinking about the place of generative AI in visual news. Doing so allows you to keep updated with the latest developments in AI and offer your thoughts on how journalists should use or avoid them.

The Worm’s Memoirs is a surreal 2D point-and-click narrative game about a single Worm and a house. Follows the Worm through their everyday routine of tending the house and uncover their story by traversing between the parallel worlds of fear and euphoria. Which side is real and which one is the delusion? Will you face everything and uncover the truth? But to what end? After all, this is just another happy day.

This work contains mild horror

The Dynamic Forest is an experiment in transforming mundane spaces into magical ones. You will encounter a familiar environment filled with local Victorian plants and wildlife that respond to your presence. A mashup of gaming technologies is adapted to embody you in a mixed reality between the expanding urban and vulnerable nature. This work is a prototype designed for installation in uninspiring places such as carparks, elevators, foyers, abandoned spaces. The intention for later versions is to include biodiversity loss data.

Let child-like wonder guide you as you explore the empty rooms of your new home. Find your own fun in childish antics or delight in smaller, quieter moments. What might you discover, not only around the house, but perhaps about yourself too?

Introducing Screenwear, a cutting-edge exploration into the future of fashion by Rosanna Li, a dedicated PhD candidate at RMIT School of Fashion and Textiles. Through her research, Rosanna delves into innovative realms, leveraging digital technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and AI image generation. Screenwear pushes the boundaries of traditional fashion, inviting audiences to embark on a captivating journey where technology intertwines seamlessly with style, opening up new and exciting possibilities in the ever-evolving landscape of fashion.

In Warklinika, players will be in charge of a makeshift hospital in the middle of a chaotic war zone, where a constantly growing number of war-wounded civilians and soldiers come to seek treatment, even from the enemy. But with limited doctors and supplies, you'll need to decide who will be treated and who will be abandoned. This project aims to raise public awareness of the medical situation in war-torn areas.

This work contains images of warfare and medical procedures

BAITHOUSE is an interactive digital event that is a 3D animated motion-capture livestream talk show. Using live motion capture, physical performance and animation, guests and hosts will be presented in a constructed digital world and in conversation with one another. As an expanded form of hybrid public programming, performance and critical discourse – BAITHOUSE is a new digital and artistic platform that will host hyper-threaded conversations around networked technologies, contemporary aesthetics and new media. Accessible to view online and presented as a hybrid live event for local audiences BAITHOUSE invites guest artists, writers, academics, and designers from across Australia to engage in Q&As and discussion around swamp technology, digital life, and internet (sub-)cultures.

Session times: 11.30am, 1pm & 2.30pm

Existential Crisis is an interactive experiential Virtual Reality artwork, that evocatively explores the relationship with the struggle of humanity to create and perceive meaning in the world that they experience, portrayed through the lens of embodiment. Viewers will wear a VR headset and participate in a time-based piece that challenges our normal perceptions of location and spatial relationships. Interactive elements consist of head-tracking and hand-tracking. In the work, multiple environments are all present in a simultaneous landscape, but the user is only ever allowed to see into these worlds via transient moments of time.