The Expanding the Present project utilises the Hobart Wireless Waterfront network around the Salamanca precinct to provide visitors with an expanded experience of reality. Visitors will be able to access a range of digital media, including images, videoclips and audio, all directly relating to their current geographic location, but all existing outside of their current time. Through a combination of archival, contemporary and speculative media vistors will experience a reviewing of their current location and an expansion of their perceptual experience as they are transported through time while remaining firmly in the present.
The initial technical scoping phase of Raef's AR project has been completed. Work is now underway on implementing the virtual objects within the AR platform with testing and final implemention phases to take place over the Summer months.
Hobart-based Raef Sawford is an artist and filmmaker working with digital media. His work investigates relationships between technology,consciousness and spatiotemporal perception and explores themes of futility and desire. Using various digital tools and processes, he aims to forge seemingly disparate phenomena into a unified whole where a moment, event or sequence can be experienced as a singular, extended present. This suspension of time and collapsing of space expresses an expansion of consciousness, opening up possibilities of a reality beyond the self.
Raef has exhibited work at CAST, MONA FOMA, The Plimsoll Gallery, Arts Tasmania, Mosman Gallery, Sydney and The Australian Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Raef is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Tasmania’s School of Art.
Further information about Raef's work can be found at http://www.raefsawford.com
