Bilbie Virtual Labs

Bilbie Virtual Labs

 For Indigenous people, the Dreaming does not merely preserve the past. Rather, it speaks of eternal becoming. It is the totality of Indigenous knowledge and its future potential, made alive through both its immediate and continuing transmission. STEPHEN GILCHRIST

The virtual world of Barani, an Aboriginal word that conveys ‘yesterday’ or ‘long ago’, simulates the concept of nonlinear time where the deep history of this continent conflates with an eternal-present. The simulation is one in a suite of significant geographical sites that Bilbie Virtual Labs have reconstructed from across Australia. Compiling information from contemporary mapping and aerial photographs, colonial archives and oral histories, Brett Leavy’s team revitalise the life and culture of Gadigal people prior to the arrival of HMS Endeavour in 1770.

As the cityscape of contemporary Sydney dissipates, the millennia old Eora Country reveals its beauty and power. The renderings of cliffs and beaches, streams and forests mirror the knowledge archived within the landscape and situate places of ancestral commune. Acting as a mnemonic device for the contemporary viewer, Barani also bends our perception and appreciation for the transmission of human history.

Barani 2019

digital simulation, with stereo sound 
Duration: 4:38 min, loop
Sound: Lewis Parter, ‘Saltwater dreaming’