The World Came Flooding In

 

REVIEW: The World Came Flooding In

Isabel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, 2025

See it at MIFF / Now or Never Festival 

"We think of home as somewhere fixed and stable. Safe as houses, the saying goes, but what does this mean when we are displaced? In the aftermath of disaster where and how do we find ourselves? For the subjects in Knowles and Sowerwine’s work creative acts of remembrance are a step towards healing."

On a sunny mid-winter day I venture to Melbourne-based artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine’s creek-side studio. I’m about to find out what a flood feels like. I’m a VR virgin, except for that time I found myself staring at simulated Roman ruins in my cousin’s loungeroom. That world was still in development but the one I’m about to experience is fully formed and about to have its world premiere. The World Came Flooding In has been several years in the making, off and on - Knowles tells me the pair work in bursts, juggling commissions and projects at different stages of development. A brief survey of their output shows a creative repertoire that encompasses film, design, writing, puppetry, photography: much ‘making’. Whatever the form, a reverence for quirk and personal detail shines through. The World Came Flooding In can be a cinematic experience, or fully interactive. It uses cardboard miniatures, sound and story to relate the experience of flood-affected people. Knowles and Sowerwine’s aim was to make something “a little bit magical or wondrous” from this difficult material. If the work is an invitation to share in ‘solastalgia’ - distress caused by environmental change - this tension is tempered. Here, the warmth of handmade blends with the ‘cool’ of technology to make something vivid and moving.

Knowles and Sowerwine met studying Media Arts RMIT in the early 2000s. They started with short films (stop-motion animation often featuring dolls and toys) before moving to interactive installations. Sowerwine talks of being drawn to the blurring of the physical space and the screen space. “We made interactive works in a number of different forms, and then saw a VR work in 2016 and were blown away by the possibilities of full immersion. We’ve always been techy, but we also like texture and real things and making the design process really tactile.” In their AR experience Night Creatures (2022), life-sized animated sartorial bats swoop down in a cinema queue to tell stories about movies, subculture and community. Their highly awarded VR film Passenger (2019), puts the player in the backseat of a taxi to explore migration and place-making. Sowerwine tracks the beginnings of The World Came Flooding In to their pandemic project Can’t Do Without You (2021) where they recreated their lockdown spaces in miniature.“The experience was really moving for us. It started us thinking about stories where the transformation of space is really dramatic, and we’d just gone through a year of being followed around by floods. We wanted to make something about the climate, but we didn’t want to be super-didactic. It was just what was in our world at the time.”

The 2022 floods across eastern Australia made the climate emergency more visible than ever. Knowles and Sowerwine had friends living in disaster zones and had themselves gone through the panic of evacuation. One of the seeds of the project was a series of community art workshops the pair facilitated in Lismore with people who’d been affected by the floods. From here the project grew. They found subjects to interview, and the world of World began to find form. They made the minatures over many months, and built the world with photogrammatry, a technique that creates 3D models and environments by analysing multiple images and seeking common ‘tie-points’. While many artists seek perfect replication, the rendering of Knowles and Sowerwine’s world has gaps. For the artists, this reflects the imprecision and fallabililty of memory. “We loved the imperfections,” Knowles says, “It’s like [the scanner] can’t remember what it’s looked at … [our subjects] can’t remember their homes completely.”

Now I’ve come to the part where I try and write about the experience without spoilers. I step into a marked-out area, put on the VR goggles and find myself in a space that seems boundless. In this inky sea there are structures: rooms and objects. I can’t gauge distances - things feel at once far away and close to hand. I’m holding a remote control and taking instruction and my first tentative steps. I’ve read that some people feel dizzy using VR, but at most I feel a little de-stabilised, a little off-kilter. As I relax and move around more, this feeling goes away. I can teleport to places and different vantages. I can even pick things up. In this world, the rain never stops falling. Other people’s memories are made manifest. I walk around in them. From the balcony of Tom’s apartment I watch the rain sheet down while the flood-waters rise and white goods float by. At Marina’s house in Maribyrnong, green parrots fly above my head, past punk records and family portraits. Here the waters have subsided but left an indelible mark; in Antoinette’s warehouse the flood arrives almost gently, mirroring the surrounds, before rising, roaring, bringing whatever it can down. In the world I lose track of time, and I also lose myself. The storytelling is direct and personable, and the wonky approximations of rooms and objects (wardrobes, chairs, pianos) enhance the feeling of intimacy. Near the end I find myself facing a sea of displaced possessions. I stand by each to hear their stories. The voices here have some distance from catastrophe; the tone is one of acceptance and memorial. Goodbye to all that. When I take the goggles off, I feel emotional, disquieted, stunned and teary. Like I’ve been through something.

In a 2015 TED talk, VR filmmaker Chris Milk declared VR the ‘ultimate empathy machine’: “It connects humans to other humans in a profound way.” The World Came Flooding In is made from cardboard, hot glue, and memory. It shows how we construct our lives and identies through place and objects. We think of home as somewhere fixed and stable. Safe as houses, the saying goes, but what does this mean when we are displaced? In the aftermath of disaster where and how do we find ourselves? For the subjects in Knowles and Sowerwine’s work creative acts of remembrance are a step towards healing.

“In Lismore, we had heard from people up the hill from where it happened,” Sowerwine says, “They didn’t really understand what the experience was like for people, how it is a traumatic thing to go through in your body.” As part of their testing and working through World they showed the prototype to people who’d lived through their experience  - “On their request!” Knowles assures me - “They were like wow, amazing. That’s exactly what it was like.” Sowerwine adds, “We very much designed this to be an experience for everyone - even my 80+ mother can do it. And in the writing, we’re talking about floods, but there’s a certain forward movement and positivity to it.”

It is only when I’m driving back home that I remember my own close call in country Victoria, the sharpie line a friend drew on her wall labelled ‘tidemark’ after the creek had breached its banks, and so rudely entered her house. Like drawing the kids’ heights on a door frame, or, no, not like that, more a kind of proof, a distinction that there was a time before and a time after, that time keeps moving and it’s better for us if we can bring ourselves to move with it.

Simmone Howell 2025