Deep Time Real Time: The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition
Presented by RMIT Design Hub Gallery
DETAILS
Free, no booking required
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
Building 100 (Design Hub) - RMIT University, Victoria Street, Carlton VIC, Australia
Deep Time Real Time: The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition explores the relationship between design and planetary systems through two opposing temporal scales – deep time and real time.
As global citizens, we struggle to reconcile this geological timescale with our everyday lives. This affects our time-based thinking, limiting our ability to make decisions on regenerative actions and to develop collective societal and design responses to the complex challenges of our planet. Today, technology offers new ways of seeing and knowing information that enable us to better understand the entangled, inter-relational and hidden conditions of our world. Technology is, however, never a neutral actor. An inherent conflict lies in the fact that many of the most innovative technologies are designed and used for military applications, or the exploration and extraction of resources. This uneasy foundation makes it imperative that we critically question how these tools and practices are utilised – and for whose benefit. Indeed, through creative ingenuity these very same technologies are being re-designed, hacked and re-deployed to support the repair, regeneration and preservation of ecologies. These adaptive and opportunistic processes are enabling new time-based thinking and spatial practices to emerge.
Deep Time Real Time reveals the agency of time-based thinking and foregrounds a research-led approach to design and creative practice. The exhibition is centred around a large-scale installation by architecture practice Simulaa, comprising a timeline of digital, geological and material samples that visualises the journey of materials through time. A series of architects, designers and artists have been invited to respond, creating a collection of time-based creative and research works presented through the lenses of ecology, energy and technology. Deep Time Real Time invites visitors to consider the complexity of these intersecting concerns, and to situate themselves in relation to the distant past and the far future.
Deep Time Real Time features creative works and research from Fayen d’Evie, Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen, Alicia Frankovich, Emma Jackson, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Nicholas Mangan and Cameron Allan McKean, Joel Sherwood Spring and Simulaa. Creative direction of the exhibition is by Fleur Watson, with co-curation by André Bennice, Anna Jankovic, and Fleur Watson. The exhibition design is by Simulaa, while graphic design is by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen. Access consultancy is provided by Access Lab & Library (ALL).
This exhibition is produced by RMIT Culture in partnership with the RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design and with the assistance of The Swayn Gallery of Australian Design. It is also supported by the Victorian Government, with core specimens supplied by the State Drill Core Library.
Participants
Fleur Watson
Fleur Watson is a curator and design researcher. She is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture & Urban Design at RMIT University and the Chair of RMIT's Practice Research Symposium Europe. Fleur is the author of The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture & Design (Routledge) and series editor of Editions: Australian Architecture Monographs (Thames & Hudson).
Anna Jankovic & André Bonnice
Anna Jankovic and André Bonnice are architects and the directors of Simulaa, an architecture practice dedicated to both built commissions and research projects. They have been educators since 2013, and hold academic positions at RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design and at the University of Melbourne School of Design, respectively. The work of the practice is defined by considered analysis and a research-based approach that prioritises time-based design thinking that recognises architecture’s inherent entanglement with social, economic, aesthetic, political, and environmental concerns. The practice has a particular interest in reconciling architecture’s relationship with technology, energy, waste, and ecology through critical experimentation.
Stuart Geddes
Stuart Geddes is a graphic designer working mostly with books. He is also a lecturer, researcher and PhD candidate at RMIT University. Stuart's work has been awarded, published and exhibited widely, and he is also one of the Australian members of Alliance Graphique Internationale.
Žiga Testen
Žiga Testen Studio is a graphic design studio based in Melbourne, Australia but operates internationally. Typically the focus of the practice is contemporary art and culture and the studio prioritises work in close collaboration with artists, curators and cultural organisations. Rather than an aesthetic or style, a context and project specific solution is sought out for each individual commission.
Fayen d'Evie
Fayen d'Evie is an artist, publisher and academic, born in Malaysia, raised in Aotearoa New Zealand and now living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands. Her projects are often collaborative and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks and texts. A lifetime of fluctuating vision has spurred creative research into blindness as a critical and imaginative position. d'Evie is the founder of independent imprint 3-ply and also the co-founder of the Access Lab and Library (ALL) with Lloyd Mst and Jon Tjhia.