Eight installations and activations created by long-standing ANAT alumni were presented across tech-enabled spaces at UniSC during ANAT SPECTRA 2025 :: Reciprocity. Several of them have origins in the ANAT Synapse program and other ANAT collaborations.

Together, these works explored sound, data, movement, and living systems as reciprocal processes, where human, technological, and ecological intelligences co-produce meaning over time. Across immersive audio, generative systems, moving image, and site-responsive installations, they invited us to listen closely to patterns of relation, attunement, and care that shape both visible and unseen worlds.

Synopses of the works are listed below in alphabetical order by title.

Concealed Spaces
Philip Samartzis

Concealed Spaces reveals latent tensions in Cold War infrastructures across the Swiss Alps. Using sound as an investigative tool, it explores hidden architectures—bunkers, dams, and research stations—designed for protection, surveillance, and environmental monitoring. Reverberations, hums, and silences evoke psychological and material pressures within these spaces. As new geopolitical and environmental uncertainties emerge, these architectures persist—not as relics, but as active sites of inquiry into power, vulnerability, and the aesthetics of concealment.

Cymatic Crucible
Toby Gifford, Chris Henschke & Jordan Lacey

This collaborative performance brings together two performance-installations: The Sonic Crucible explores the relationship between rotating singing bowls and standing waves, and the Cymatic Spiral exploring relationships between sonic matter and geometry. Using electronics, hydrophones, water, light and sound these two installations will generate an overlapping “caustic plane” projected onto a large screen. This forms a reciprocal system, making sensible the ever-present dynamics of the material world.

Isonageki (Sea Lament)
Ros Bandt

Isonageki (Sea Lament), 43 minutes, surround sound, is an immersive deep sea dive for Abalone, a very long tradition of sustainable fishing by the Ama Japanese women first mentioned in the pillowbook. They free dive for abalone holding their breath for up to two minutes and have self imposed restrictions to prevent them taking too much. Site specific recordings underwater and in the air were made in the tiny island of Sugashima the most easterly point in Japan as well as in the anechoic Chamber in ABC studios in Ultimo Sydney, during Ros’s audio. arts residency.

ReSound
Nigel Helyer

​​ReSound is a response to a massive data set of underwater audio collected by a buoy moored in the Tasman Fracture. The data was divided into twelve one-week periods and developed into two series of sculptural data clocks. The first series was formed from 2D laser-cut profiles and the second as 3D prints in nylon and ceramic. Several of the resulting forms were also animated as a data projection. Each form can be read as a 24-hour clock, with the vertical axis representing audio frequency and the horizontal axis representing amplitude.

The Mavin System
Pierre Proske

The Mavin System is an immersive installation consisting of spatialised sound and light-emitting devices that can communicate with each other through networking. This installation emerges as a creative experiment at the intersection of cybernetics, systems thinking and generative systems. Inspired by the biological metaphor of groups of activating insects and frogs, this installation is a generator of time-varying luminosonic atmospheres. It is experienced as a hybrid field of activating entities – biomimetic yet synthetic – emitting sound, light and shadows from multiple points.

The Space Between Certainties
Andrea Rassell

The Space Between Certainties is a moving image installation for the 320° CAVE2 environment that celebrates women scientists in Australian nanotechnology. Interweaving interview footage with microscopic imagery, the work explores the integration of religion with scientific pursuit and reveals multifaceted identities of scientists, migrants, mothers, and women of faith.

The Taken Path
Catherine Truman & Ian Gibbins

The Taken Path is an open-ended experiment in observation and embodied experience. At monthly intervals over a year, Catherine and Ian video-recorded a defined path traversing the reciprocal natural and altered landscapes of Carrick Hill estate in Adelaide’s foothills. As we follow the path already taken, how do our shared observations evolve? How does our awareness shift? How can we encode and replay our shifting perceptions? Colourblind at the edges, we are not the centre.

Translucent Kinship
Keith Armstrong

Translucent Kinship is a new artwork from the Forest Art Intelligence (FAI) project (2023-), which aims to learn from intelligent, creative reciprocities of an emergent forest. Plants and environments thrive in profoundly reciprocal relationships – forming inseparable bonds dependent upon co-creative cycles of giving, receiving and exchange. However, their extraordinary ‘collective intelligence’ is quite unlike our own self-conscious human intelligence, and so we often fail to recognise or learn from it, preferring instead to privilege intelligences much more ‘like us’.

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Presented by ANAT and UniSC, on Kabi Kabi Country, in the heart of the Sunshine Coast Biosphere Reserve, ANAT SPECTRA 2025 :: Reciprocity brings together Australian artists working at the intersections of art, science, and technology to explore the ethics and possibilities of reciprocal exchange.