Cover Image: Visitors engage with April Phillips’ immersive digital environment Body Place (2024), a precursor to her new PICA commission Under Waters. Photo: Jacqui Manning, courtesy of the artist.

PICA’s boorda yeyi and April Phillips’ Under Waters
27 November 2025

In a recent book review of W. David Marx’s Blank Space, Dominic Green pessimistically opined that “The digital sea erodes narrative and chronology, the material of epics and histories and their modern shadow, the novel. From them we have long constructed images of the future. Now we are trapped in a perpetual present.”

And yet the conjunction of digital technology and traditional storytelling is not an unholy alliance; nor should the internet’s “perpetual present,” be seen as the existential dead-end many doomsayers would have you believe.

“Many artists are increasingly working with tools, questions and methodologies that sit between art, science and technology,” observes Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts CEO/Director Hannah Mathews. “We felt it was important to create a dedicated framework that not only supports artists working in these hybrid spaces but also builds literacy and capacity within our institution and communities.”

boorda yeyi, meaning “future now” in Whadjuk Noongar, is PICA’s new three-year immersive arts program – one that fully embraces new technology as tool, technique and tissue.

It is also the ocean from which emerges Under Waters, the inaugural Immersive Arts Commission winner by Wiradjuri–Scottish media artist April Phillips. Awarded the $75,000 commission, Phillips with Under Waters proposes nothing less than an “interactive digital immersive installation that invites the viewer to enter, and stay, in a pocket of deep time.”

“Under Waters prioritises people at every turn,” says Phillips. “The work sets aside fast-paced digital experiences that lack resonance or generosity. Instead, viewers will be invited to stay longer in this rich sensory world, rewarded by its wonders and transformative connections.”

The installation is conceived as a parallel universe – part ocean trench, part star field – manifested via projection, computation and “virtual clay, photogrammetry, image composites, virtual cameras and simulations of light and ultra-dynamic skies.”

Audiences will wade through data, fossils, celestial debris, even body-tracked sound. Yet here’s the thing: the data animating the space will come not from machine learning, but from human presence itself. “The immersive technologies will generate real-time data collected from human attendance rather than derived from artificial intelligence… this commission will be… made with human creativity in the new wave of ‘Digital Handmade’,” Phillips says.

For Mathews, this balance is why Phillips’ proposal stood out from the others. “We were looking for a proposal that understood the opportunities of technology but also interrogated its limits,” she says. “Under Waters stood out because it held technology lightly as a tool in service of deep ideas about place, memory, ecology and the environment.”

The judging panel, comprising voices across film, performance, Indigenous storytelling and real-time technology, echoed that sentiment. They chose Phillips for her capacity “to move beyond spectacle, creating work that is immersive in form while interrogating how audiences connect with both technology and Country.”

Phillips’ artistic trajectory gives some insight into this rare fluency. A member of the Friends with Computers collective, she has been at the forefront of Australia’s immersive practices since 2019. Her collaborative orientation – working with virtual art director Pat Younis and media artist Jordan East – speaks to her commitment to cross-disciplinary creation. For Under Waters, she is also engaging First Nations collaborators from regional Western Australia, honouring the commission’s grounding in Country.

Such collaboration is built into boorda yeyi. “No single discipline holds all the knowledge required to make meaningful immersive work,” Mathews says. “Our role is to create the conditions in which artists, technologists, First Nations practitioners and regional communities can meet on equal footing.” 

This responsibility extends to ethical questions such as cultural sovereignty, data integrity, access, and a refusal to allow technology to trump story.

In this sense, boorda yeyi’s “future now” is not merely a slogan. It is part of a larger moral compass. “To consider the future as something already arriving is to recognise that we are responsible for shaping it,” Mathews says. “It positions immersive arts as a space where we can explore the tensions and possibilities of this moment.”

One of those tensions lies in audience experience. Mathews believes a work like Under Waters subtly reorganises how visitors inhabit PICA’s galleries. “Under Waters invites audiences to move slowly, to dwell and to attune to rhythms that are not human-centred,” she explains. Rather than stepping into an installation as observers, viewers “are in it, entangled with it, influencing it and participating in its process.”

This shift from gallery-as-container to gallery-as-ecosystem has consequences for PICA’s future programming. It recalibrates spatial, conceptual and institutional design toward presence, emergence and encounter.

The work’s life will not end in Perth. Following its 2026 premiere, Under Waters will tour regional Western Australia. Mathews is emphatic about the power of immersive art to speak across place.

“Audiences, whether in the city or in remote areas, [may] feel a sense of recognition and resonance… Immersive art creates an experience that is shared, bodily, immediate. In this way, it can become a new language for connection across place and culture.”

Perhaps that’s the deeper promise of boorda yeyi: to become a catalyst for further conversation – between disciplines, between communities, between worlds visible and invisible. As Mathews says: “We hope PICA becomes a meeting point for broader conversations about how technology mediates our relationships – with each other, with Country, and with the more-than-human world.”

Under Waters is on at PICA from 19 February – 29 March 2026, before touring regional Western Australia with boorda yeyi’s touring partner, ART ON THE MOVE.