Gondwana VR: The Exhibition

A world-first multi-sensory installation distilling 100 years of climate data into a single day, this unique meditation on one of Australia’s richest ecosystems invites visitors to become lost in an evocative tribute to its lush foliage, light-streaked canopies, and forest floor teeming with life.

Fresh from screenings at SXSW, Sundance Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, co-creators Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts’ have developed a unique open-play environment inspired by five months of research spent off-grid and on the ground in the World Heritage-listed Daintree and surrounding Wet Tropics.

GONDWANA VR can be experienced through VR headsets that transport the user into an interactive digital forest, where you’ll encounter weather, seasons and biodiversity shifts as you navigate a vast map of ancient trees, rugged mountains, and idyllic beaches populated by rare birdlife.

With twin-tier ticketing, you can choose to slip on the VR headset and roam the digital forest, or simply explore the physical exhibition space – a tranquil experiment in multi-sensory place-making that expands the VR experience out of the headset with projection, lighting, and cinematic sound.

With each cycle showing different possible futures for the forest informed by climate projections up to the year 2090, visitors are drawn into a broader narrative that stirs below: the forest is deteriorating, and whether it survives or thrives hinges on how we interact with it. Do we ignore the effects of global heating on this haven of biodiversity, and let it bleach and wither? Or do we recognize the huge impacts our actions can have on our most irreplaceable ecological treasures?