Enter a world where art and science converge and the comfortingly familiar becomes surprisingly foreign. Showcasing animal life from Victoria, Australia, Nature in the Dark (NITD) invites international artists to create video works inspired by ecological habitat surveys from the state’s national parks. Video and photographs originally used by scientists to identify animals and measure population sizes are creatively repurposed into intriguing video art. The resulting collaborative works offer new perspectives of the environments around us.
NITD has produced two editions exhibited in Melbourne, Australia, and Baltimore, Maryland, respectively. The survey photographs used in the first NITD series originate from studies on the long term effects of the absence or presence of fire on wildlife in Bunyip State Park and Wombat State Forest in Victoria. Information is collected by employing motion-triggered cameras through the Victorian National Park Association’s (VNPA) CaughtOnCamera program. Data for the NITD marine series is sourced from VNPA’s Reef Watch project which explores underwater environments along the Victorian coastline.
Photo credits: Tracey Brown, on behalf of National Aquarium.