The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition
February 25–May 17, 2025
Level 2, Building 100, RMIT University, Corner of Swanston and Victoria Streets Carlton, Victoria, Australia 3053
Melbourne 3000
Australia
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 11am–5pm
Saturday 12–4pm
T +61 3 9925 2260
galleries@rmit.edu.au
Deep Time Real Time explores the relationship between design and planetary systems through two opposing temporal scales—“deep time” and “real time”.
The exhibition features a largescale installation—designed by architecture practice Simulaa—comprising a “timeline” of digital, geological, and material samples that visualises the journey of materials through time.
Presented alongside the interactive structure—and curated through the lenses of ecology, energy and technology—are seven time-based creative works by Fayen d’Evie, Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen with Will Neill, Alicia Frankovich, Emma Jackson, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Nicholas Mangan and Cameron Allan McKean, Joel Sherwood Spring.
As global citizens, we struggle to reconcile geological timescales with our everyday lives. This affects our time-based thinking, limiting our ability to make decisions on regenerative actions and to develop collective societal and design responses to the complex challenges of our planet.
Today, technology offers new ways of seeing and knowing information that enables us to better understand the entangled, inter-relational and hidden conditions of our world. Through gathering, analysing and visualising data—often in real time—we can better understand environmental conditions that would, otherwise, be invisible.
Deep Time Real Time advocates for the agency of citizen-led “time literacy”, towards developing new, collective societal and design methodologies to respond to the complex challenges of our planet.
Creative practices: Fayen d’Evie, Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen with Will Neill, Alicia Frankovich, Emma Jackson, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Nicholas Mangan and Cameron Allan McKean, Joel Sherwood Spring, and Simulaa.
Research contributions: Algal Processing Group, Clean Air Task Force, Julien Comer-Kleine, Copernicus Sentinel-2, C-SPAN, iNaturalist, Palynology, HyperSens Laboratory, Palaeoecology and Biogeography Research Lab, Resources Victoria (Geological Survey of Victoria division, Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), uRADMonitor
Creative direction by Fleur Watson. Curated by André Bonnice, Anna Jankovic and Fleur Watson. Exhibition design by Simulaa. Graphic design by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen. Access consultancy by Access Lab and Library (ALL).
The exhibition is produced by RMIT Culture with the support of The Swayn Gallery of Australian Design. Supported by RMIT School of Architecture and Urban Design and the Victorian Government, with core specimens supplied by the State Drill Core Library.
