Vivid Frequencies is an audio-visual artwork experienced through a web application on a mobile device that helps you see and hear the natural landscape in a different way. While walking around one of the site-specific locations, viewers can watch or listen to the app digitally recompose the camera view and sonic landscape of the surrounding physical world.

The original work responds to research by the Royal Botanic Gardens that predicts environmental conditions in 2070 and models future growth maps for a selection of native Australia species. The audio-visual alterations in Vivid Frequencies are activated in response to the participant’s proximity to these species on site, returning the scientific information of herbaria collections into living ecosystems.

For ISEA 2024 Vivid Frequencies has been redeveloped for the Brisbane Botanic Gardens and the Australian National University. In this new iteration informed by the theme of ‘Everywhen’, the image dismantles and reforms in relation to past time rather than future, drawing on the species’ geographic origin.The audio composition signifies the average age of the species, with deeper, slower sounds signal the viewer is close to an ancient being, and lighter, faster tempos indicate shorter lifespans. Through this audio-visual code, the mobile device acts as a portal through which to tune into divergent, non-human scales of time and space that are interwoven with ours.

Vivid Frequencies was commissioned as part of The Tellus Art Project, a collaboration between the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, the University of NSW Art and Design, Bundanon Trust and Open Humanities Press, within the Herbarium Tales research project funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Dr Prue Gibson, Professor Marie Sierra, and Dr Sigi Lottkandt.

Video | Sammy Hawker
Developer | Dylan Shorten
Music | Kim Cunio