Van Sowerwine, Isobel Knowles. Juried Artists
Constellations
The Cube at QUT Gardens Point
Artist Statement
Night Creatures is an augmented reality experience celebrating the energy, connection, and intimacy of the film festival queue via animated cinema-goers who take the form of fruit bats. Eight well-dressed stop-motion puppets talk to you about their favourite films, connections to subcultures, cinema experiences that shaped them, best film snacks, and other interesting and moving stories. Featuring eight short stories – derived from interviews conducted with a diverse selection of film festival patrons, volunteers, and employees – and a ninth experience inviting an audience response, viewers can interact with the animated bats at various locations.
Each story is delivered as a stop-motion animated performance, each with a uniquely sculpted, stylishly dressed bat puppet. The stories contain surreal and magical elements to enhance the storytelling — surprise chickens, floating fish, a rainstorm — help to visually interpret the ideas embedded in the dialogue. All stories contain music to enhance and enrich them, and closed captions are provided for when audio can’t be used. Each story has a duration of between 50 and 90 seconds
Night Creatures was originally designed to be experienced in a cinema queue. Cardboard cutout bats fly above and stand amongst the audience providing access via a QR code accessible on personal mobile devices. The work runs in a browser on any online mobile device.
Creating a work that can be held in the hand of the viewer was for us a perfectly intimate format for creating a connection with the audience and the personal nature of the stories. Augmented reality works so well with our hand-made aesthetic, which were able to preserve to make our characters feel real. We partnered with Art Processors who worked with us to realise our very specific and at times technically-challenging vision, and feel thrilled that we succeeded in creating something that feels real and analogue within the digital world of AR. This was also due to the incredible music composed by Lehmann B Smith, and the compositing by Benjamin Portas.
About the artists
Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine create technologically adventurous, elaborately detailed animated films, XR and immersive installations. Their practice centres around using animation to speak to an audience’s imagination directly, exposing unexpected emotional responses. Their immersive work aims to bridge the gap between on-screen and off-screen reality, disrupting normal perception to create significant narrative engagement.
Their 2022 augmented reality stop-motion animation ‘Night Creatures’ was created for the 2022 Melbourne International Film Festival as the inaugural MIFF XR commission. ‘Night Creatures’ had its international premiere at the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2021 they exhibited ‘Can’t do without you’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, blending three-dimensional miniatures, photography and animation to explore the psychological impact of lockdown in Melbourne.
In 2019 they created ‘Take Me With You’, a retrospective of works from 2004-2019 at Artspace at Realm, Ringwood. The showcase of this exhibition was ‘Passenger’ (2019), their 360 VR stop-motion installation. ‘Passenger’ had its international premiere in competition at the 76th Venice International Film Festival and won the Virtual Reality Award – Best Film at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
Their films have been screened at film festivals across the world including at Cannes (where they were awarded a Special Mention), Chicago and Sundance. Their installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the ICA, London, at the Seoul New Media Biennale and at the Art Gallery of NSW. Their installation ‘You Were In My Dream’ won the 2010 Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award. Their 2011 interactive installation, ‘It’s a jungle in here’, won an Award of Distinction (Interactive Arts) at the 2012 Prix Ars Electronica.
They are currently developing an XR installation that investigates the lived experience of the climate emergency through flooding.
Credits: Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine