SPECTRA Screen featured a short program of works presented on the opening day of ANAT SPECTRA 2025 :: Reciprocity, alongside a curated group of works screened across the duration of the event. 

From hypnotic algorithmic experiments and fable-inspired performance, to Indigenous-led ecological collaborations and post-human mythologies, SPECTRA Screen revealed a striking diversity of practice, media and ideas.

The program also embraced immersive community storytelling and intimate explorations of family and environment. Together, these works surveyed reciprocity, interconnection and care across human, more-than-human and environmental worlds.

Synopses of these ten rich video works are listed below in alphabetical order by title.

Adventures in Nurbland Composite
Linda Loh

This is an experiment in distortion of original light based source material, with neurophysiological and star data, these being a reciprocal relationship that embraces the idea that all is one. Algorithmic and tone reactive procedures are used. The result is a non-narrative journey, with its own internal logic, ephemeral and elusive. Experimental sound made by the artist helps to transport the viewer to another space beyond mind and body, mesmerising and hypnotic (image at top of page).

Beeyali
Lyndon Davis, Leah Barclay and Tricia King

Beeyali is a First Nations led interdisciplinary exploration of cymatics and ecological reciprocity on Kabi Kabi Country. The project brings together Indigenous knowledge with sound, photography, and environmental sciences, to develop and explore new methods for cymatics to visualise the calls of wildlife to demonstrate ecological interconnection and interdependence in the environment. These visualisations are realised as large-scale projection artworks and aim to foster environmental empathy and a deeper connection to Country for audiences that do not have regular access to ecological experiences.

Heaving the Needles
Friendly Conspiracy (Heidi Kenyon, Ben Davidson, William Rixon and Sergio Serra López)

Heaving the Needles is a moving image and sound work. It includes timelapse footage of oyster mushrooms growing, whose electromagnetic signals (variations between the mycelium and fruiting bodies) were harvested to inform the sound work featuring analog synth frequencies, cello and trumpet.

Latency + Lacerations: Mapping the Divided Body
Amanda Bennetts

A film tracing the subterrestrial path of the Sunshine Coast submarine cable from the data centre to the sea, as it emerges within a so-called smart city. The work interrogates the collision of embodied memory and digital abstraction, where global data flows seep into local terrains, folding personal history into infrastructural traces. Through fragmented visual and sonic rhythms, incorporating machine learning elements, it questions how connectivity reconfigures bodily presence, rendering lived experience as spectral data residue.

Moving Stone
Jingwei Bu

Moving Stone moving image is created based on the Chinese fable A Foolish Man Moved a Mountain, set against a partial mountain painting by Bu to response to Qiu Jiongjiong’s film A New Old Play, Moving Stone is a reflection on the artist’s understanding of life as a process and journey that requires resilience and repetitive ritual throughout its various roles and responsibilities. The work contains a set of three actions repeated endlessly by multiple copies of the performer in various sized groupings, working alone or collectively as a group, the minimal movement indicates the result of persistence. 

narratio regenerationis (the narrative of rebirth)
Cara-Ann Simpson

narratio regenerationis (the narrative of rebirth) is a stereo-sound single-channel video artwork featuring Acacia podalyriifolia. Acacia’s epitomise reciprocity through symbiotic relationships with bacteria to nitrogen-fix soil, create habitat for other species and regenerate eco-systems. This work celebrates Acacia podalyriifolia and its reciprocal relationships with the environment, inhabitants and visitors. The sound, from the plant’s site, shares the rich aural environment that this wattle has supported. The soundscape is also shared as spectrography (sound data visualisation).

Skin Bible: The word made flesh
Niki Sperou and [M] Dudeck

Skin Bible: The word made flesh (video essay 2020) is the concept stage of a collaborative social sculpture and art/science project by Niki Sperou and [M] Dudeck. The project was realised in performance, installation, artifacts, vestments, sound, and other physical and non-physical interspecies entanglements that produce a post-human mythology/pseudo-religion for the information age (2024). Skin Bible is a laboratory for discussions, activities, and other investigations that support a durational performance of illuminating a lab-produced seaweed polymer parchment seeded with artists’ cells.

Rangipuy: Coming from the beach

Miyarrka Media

An invitation to connection and care from the beaches of Arnhem Land. What can a beach tell us about life and its ongoing possibilities? This mesmerising work-in-progress from Arnhem Land offers a powerful counterpoint to the images of environmental ruin that now haunt our collective futures. This is a film made for the beach inside.

Terra Rara Precious Earth
The Yimbaya Maranoa Collective

The Yimbaya Maranoa Collective uses traditional and digital technologies to generate content. Audio-visual immersive storytelling and participatory sessions foreground truth-telling and the shared, diverse relationships with place, deep time, colonialism, mapping a sense of home and belonging. In 2024 the collective gathered for five days at a property named Terrarara near Mitchell. Its name has been used in work created for Terra-Rara Precious Earth.

Thresholds
Polly Stanton

Originally commissioned for The Unconformity Festival, Thresholds is a large-scale moving image work that explores the sonic and material landscapes of Western Lutruwita / Tasmania’s remote mining region. Created in collaboration with the Queenstown community choir, the work combines experimental choral performance with 8K video imagery to resound the now-shuttered underground spaces of the historic Mt Lyell copper mine. Through layered sound and image, Thresholds evokes the complex entanglements between settler legacies, ancient landscapes and Australia’s extractive frontier

Winimaku Ara Papa Wiimatjaraku
Lisa Stefanoff and Rosalyn Boko

A beloved papa (dog). A hungry eagle. Children determined to save their little family member. Short animation based on seven paintings by Margaret Nampitjinpa Boko (Tangentyere Artists). Developed by the Mparntwe-based Ngunytjuku Mamaku Tjukurpa Kanyini Wanka (Keeping Mother’s and Father’s Stories Alive) group. Directed by Rosalyn Brenda Boko and her late father David Jangala Boko. Produced by Lisa Stefanoff. Animated by Jonathan Daw. Sound design by Jez Conlon. A new way of holding family memories ~ mixamilani.

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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.