Nuclear Futures

Sydney-based digital artist Linda Dement recently released Maralinga-Babies’ Bones 2016, an augmented reality placed on the Marling airstrip.

21,830 virtual bones can be viewed on the Maralinga air-strip, on smartphone through the free app Layar.

Maralinga- Babies’ Bones 2016. Augmented reality by Linda Dement.

The work responds to the chilling Defence Report DEFE 16/808 that reveals that from 1957 to 1978, 21,830 dead babies’ femurs were secretly taken for testing in order to determine the spread of radiation from atomic tests carried out at Maralinga. Samples came from hospitals all around Australia.
(See Frank Walker, MARALINGA, Hachette, 2014)

The artwork is an outcome of the Nuclear Futures program. To access via the Layar app, choose geo-layers and search for ‘maralinga’.

Linda Dement has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, interactive, performative, textual and virtual. Her work deals with issues of disturbance, commingling psycho-corporeality with the digital and electronic, giving form to the difficult territory of the unbearable and conflicted.

Her interactive, programmed and still image work has been widely exhibited internationally and locally, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Ars Electronica in Austria, the International Symposia of Electronic Art in Sydney and Montreal and at Impakt Media Arts Festivals in Europe. She is twice winner of the Australian National Digital Art Award and has been awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts.

For Nuclear Futures, Linda has produced a wide range of digital artwork and designs, and is a key contributor to the immersive projection installations 10 Minutes to Midnight and Ngurini (Searching) presented on cylindrical screen.

Ngurini (Searching). Artwork by Linda Dement. Photo by Danielle Marwick.

10 Minutes to Midnight. Artwork by Linda Dement. Photo by Tania Safi.

10 Minutes to Midnight. Artwork by Linda Dement. Photo by Tania Safi.

Previous Artworks

Killer

Series of images for Ends of the Earth, a collaboration with environmental campaigner and film maker Jane Castle.

Kill Fix

An augmented reality work for Networked Artforms and Tactical Magic event, Hobart