The World Came Flooding In
An XR installation by Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine
World Premiere August 2025
Embark on a journey where people’s experiences of floods highlight how we all embody objects with meaning, feelings and memories.
Thursday 21 - Sunday 24 August 2025
ACMI
Presented by MIFF and Now or Never
Tickets and more information available through:
A house is never the same after a river runs through it.
In The World Came Flooding In, lost objects and spaces are recreated by the artists in collaboration with flood affected people. Virtual reality, projections, miniatures, photographs and sound are thoughtfully orchestrated, exploring the rich inner world that remains when everything has been washed away.
We hear from three people - Marina, Antoinette and Tom, in their own words as they share their stories of living through a flood, separated by thousands of kilometres but connected by shared experience. Using cardboard and other simple materials, the artists artfully recreate the lost homes of each storyteller in miniature, then, via photogrammetry the rooms are translated into virtual reality.
The result is an evocative and wondrous tour through memory spaces. This is a lyrical and unique experiential work that explores personal memory, grief and loss, and the shared experience of an extreme climate event.
Press
“Imagine your house under water. This VR film takes us inside the flood”, Simmone Howell, The Age, Saturday August 16th 2025 pp 8-9 and online. View PDF
“The World Came Flooding In review (Melbourne Int. Film Festival)”, Luke Buckmaster, The VR Critic , August 31st 2025, online.
“Two Filmmakers Have Used Miniatures and VR To Re-Create the Experience of the 2022 Floods”, Anthony Frajman, Broadsheet, August 22 2025, online.
Directors’ notes
Five years ago we nearly drowned. We were caught in a rip in the ocean at Brunswick Heads and almost didn’t make it out. We gained a profound and bodily understanding of the power of water.
Three years ago Eastern Australia began to flood. We travelled to Mullumbimby to visit friends in February and it began to rain. The day after we returned, flood waters cut our friends off from the town. We travelled to Byron Bay in March for work. It didn’t stop raining. We woke up surrounded by water. Throughout the year we watched as river after river broke and caused a ‘100 year flood’ event.
Water makes life on earth sustainable. Humans have built ways of controlling it, but water has the underlying power to overwhelm and destroy. Our close call with a strong coastal undercurrent connected us to the sensory experience of destructive water and created in us a sense of disquiet as river after river broke its banks in 2022.
The merciless force of raging water changes your life in an instant. What do we find within us afterwards?
The World Came Flooding In is our response to the sense of urgency we feel around the climate emergency as little by little it floods into all of our lives.
We began the project with a series of community creative workshops in Lismore where we offered a space for flood affected people to come together and remember things they’d lost during the floods through simple paper craft and photography. The project grew outwards from this important kernel and we are forever grateful to the generosity of all the communities we have worked with.
Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine, July 2025
Key story contributors
Tom Doig
Tom Doig is a writer and academic who moved to Meanjin/Brisbane QLD in January 2022. Six weeks later the basement of his rental apartment building in West End flooded when the Maiwar river broke its banks. The cleanup and subsequent recovery made him question how communities and individuals behave in a crisis.
Antoinette O’Brien
Antoinette O’Brien is an artist who lives on unceded Bundjalung land in Lismore, NSW. Her house was destroyed by floods in 2022, with water rising to ceiling height prompting a dramatic escape. She watched her unfired ceramic pieces turn back into mud as the floodwaters rose.
Marina Perkovich
Croatian-born Marina Perkovich is an artist living in Naarm/Melbourne. For many years she lived along the banks of the Maribyrnong river until floods in 2022 meant she had to sell her home. She is still repairing the artwork, records and other precious items that were damaged in the flood. She misses her beautiful garden with its native and fruit trees, and the animals that used to visit.
Key Crew
Directors - Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine
With a shared passion for stop-motion animation, storytelling and technology, Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine create technologically adventurous, elaborately detailed animated films, XR and immersive installations.
Their work blends three-dimensional miniatures, photography, animation and immersive technologies in unique and emotionally charged, surreal environments. They are fascinated by tension that lies beneath an apparently calm surface and how stories and the way they are told can change our perception of the world.
Their films and immersive experiences have premiered at film festivals across the world including at Cannes (where they were awarded a Special Mention), Venice, Rotterdam, Chicago and Sundance. Their installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally including at GOMA, MONA, NGV, Art Gallery of NSW, Ars Electronica, Linz, the ICA, London, and at the Seoul New Media Biennale. Their installation You Were In My Dream won the 2010 Premier of Queensland's National New Media Art Award. Their VR film Passenger won the Virtual Reality Award - Best Film at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Their Augmented Reality work Night Creatures won the 2023 AIDC award for best Immersive/Interactive Documentary.
Producer - Philippa Campey
Philippa Campey’s first work with Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine was ‘Clara’ in 2005, which was awarded the Jury Special Mention in Competition at Cannes. She has since collaborated with Isobel and Van on ‘Passenger’ (Venice Immersive, VR, 2019) and ‘Night Creatures’ (MIFF XR Commission, 2022). Along with producing feature drama, television and theatrical documentaries for the screen, Philippa also collaborates with other award-winning visual artists, including acclaimed artist Reko Rennie’s WHAT DO WE WANT? and INITIATION OA_RR video installations.
Executive Producer - Ben Joseph Andrews
Working with Emma Roberts, his work integrates VR within bespoke multi-sensory environments and performance-driven installations to create collective experiences ranging from the transcendent to the ecstatic, the transformational to the sublime. Projects have been exhibited at Sundance New Frontier, IDFA, SXSW, CPH:DOX, Sheffield Doc/Fest and the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).
Andrews’ interest in the visceral and bodily affect of XR is supported by a practice-led PhD at the University of Melbourne, exploring the emergent framework of sensory experience and composition in virtual immersion. In 2022, he was awarded Best Direction for Immersive/Interactive by the Australian Directors Guild (ADG).
Sound Designers - Byron Scullin And Mark Mitchell, Fuligin
Fuligin Sound is Byron J Scullin and Mark Mitchell. They specialise in composition and audio design for VR, video games, and installations.
Mark has been making music and sound professionally for over twenty years, releasing music on Mush Records and The Leaf Label. Byron is one of Australia’s most experienced sound artists whose works - including Bass Bath and Siren Song - have been presented locally and internationally.
Fuligin created the sound for Heavenly Bodies, which received the ‘Excellence in Sound’ award at the 2022 Australian Game Developer Awards.
Composer - Biddy Connor
Biddy Connor is a composer, arranger, and performer for film, TV, theatre, and community events. In 2016, she was a finalist for the Melbourne Music Prize. As Artistic Director of The Letter String Quartet, she explores new sonic realms and was nominated for a Green Room Award. Biddy has collaborated with artists like Mick Harvey, John Cale, and Tim Spanos. She co-produced a folk opera with Richard J. Frankland and is currently working on new projects, including Light Burst and a 2024 Chamber Made commission.
Lead Programmer - Steve Hadley
Steve Hadley is a Creative Technologist exploring how technology can unlock new forms of human experience. With a background in XR and game design he combines deep technical expertise with a strong design sensibility to craft immersive digital experiences, interactive installations, and expressive software. From experimental art to large-scale commercial products, Steve thrives on pushing boundaries and transforming ambitious creative ideas into compelling, human-centered realities that resonate with audiences across physical and virtual spaces.
Testimonials
“I was very grateful to get to share the creative making workshop offered by Isobel and Van in 2023 through Lismore Regional Gallery. It coloured my experience of the flood in deeply positive ways, enriching and healing aspects of loss, like painting a black and white landscape or memory with colour. I am fond of the experience and firmly believe such activities hold immense value for communities that have experienced trauma, loss and grief. “
- Antoinette O’Brien, key story contributor and flood-affected Lismore resident
“The workshop with Van and Isobel changed my trajectory. It was like I could only walk worry round and round until that lovely peaceful few hours making tangible the nebulous memories love. Then to actually walk in their misty world of the hologrammes brought my cells right back together in attention to the excitement of new perspectives and therefore new possibilities to adventure.”
- Frances Danon, project contributor and flood-affected Lismore resident
"Thank you so much for today’s delightful memory postcards workshop. I’m really touched that you are doing such loving work in looking after people like us. I loved the process of making it.“
- Valerie, Lismore, project contributor and flood-affected Lismore resident
Credits
Written, Directed, Co-produced and Animated by Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine
Featuring: Tom Doig, Antoinette O’Brien and Marina Perkovich
with flood-affected residents from Ballina, Gympie, Lismore & Maribyrnong
Produced by Philippa Campey
Executive Producer: Ben Joseph Andrews
Sound Designers: Fuligin Sound - Byron J Scullin & Mark Mitchell
Composer: Biddy Connor
Lead Developer: Steve Hadley
Assistant Developer: Julie Zenou
Trauma Informed Practice Consultant: Kate Thomas
Volumetric Capture: 4DR Studios
Volumetric Performers: Luke Conroy, Paulien Dresscher, Anne Fehres
Additional Story Editor: Glen Maw
Videographer and Digital Strategist: Kimberly Summer
Additional Videographers: Glen Maw & Anna Jeffries
Publicist: Alicia Brescianini - ABCG Film
‘Scorpion Song’ written and performed by Kathryn Buck
Thanks to BIGBANG Studio, Broadcast Design, Martyn Coutts, Camilla Hannan, Chris Luscri, Mahen Raj, Emma Roberts, Jackie Turnure, Anna Tweedale.
Workshop partners: Benalla Art Gallery, GenWest, Gympie Regional Gallery, Lismore Regional Gallery, Northern Rivers Community Gallery.
The World Came Flooding In prototype was presented at International Film Festival Rotterdam CineMart 2023
Developed with the assistance of Frame Documentary.
Produced with the assistance of VicScreen.
Principal production funding from Screen Australia.
A Film Camp production.
Contact info@isobelandvan.com for more information
or visit us on Instagram @theworldcamefloodingin