Flashover is an immersive media artwork that reimagines the devastating force of the Black Summer fires, based on a volunteer firefighter’s personal experiences. The project is led by Dr Robert Walton from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, and visual artist Dr C J Taylor.
A free public exhibition of Flashover is running for two weeks until 14 February at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music’s LED Volume Studio. The experience encompasses multiple screens of different scales and specially made sets and sound design created by University of Melbourne technicians.
The artwork combines photography, animation and immersive sound techniques to represent the experience of living through a flashover – an overwhelming fire front sweeping across a landscape, razing everything in its path.
The experience encourages audiences to look beyond the human viewpoint and encounter bushfires from the perspectives of flora, fauna and the fire itself. Audiences move through several distinctive spaces and encounter a cast of characters, including virtual representations of real-life volunteer firefighters and animated wildlife.
“Flashover finds a new visual language for piecing together the fragmented memories of trauma with the indifference and terrifying ferocity of fire,” says Walton, “It creates a space for audiences to contemplate the ‘fight’ with fire, to find beauty in this terrible fate we’ve brought upon ourselves, and to come to terms with the devastation we’re living through – the emergency of our times, which will increasingly impact our ways of life over the coming century.”
Taylor, who is a volunteer firefighter and has experienced a flashover firsthand, says Flashover will challenge audiences to sit with the stark realities of the climate emergency and decide how to take action.
“From a climate point of view, we occupy a world that is at a tipping point – fires in particular are burning hotter, faster and more frequently,” says Taylor. “Flashover intentionally doesn’t provide you with any answers — instead it asks questions. We want to reignite conversations around what it means to be living at this point in time, and what we as individuals and collectives can do.”
Flashover runs at the University of Melbourne’s LED Volume Studio until 14 February 2025
