Flashover — Multimedia artwork provides unique insights into bushfires
An innovative University of Melbourne multimedia project, which harnessed the latest visual effects technology to offer new insights into the ferocity of bushfires, was exhibited at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music in February.
Flashover was an immersive media artwork that reimagined the devastating force of the Black Summer fires, based on a volunteer firefighter’s real-life experiences.
Led by Dr Robert Walton and Dr Phillip Wilkinson from the University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music and visual artist Dr CJ Taylor, the project combined cutting-edge photography, animation, and immersive sound techniques to represent the unphotographable experience of living through a flashover — an inundating fire front sweeping across the landscape, razing everything in its path.
The free public exhibition of Flashover took place over two weeks in February 2025 at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music’s nationally leading LED Volume Studio and was visited by 1,600 people. The experience encompassed multiple screens of different scales and specially made sets and sound design created by University of Melbourne experts.
As an exhibition, Flashover invites audiences to look beyond the human viewpoint and to encounter bushfires from the perspectives of flora, fauna, and the fire itself. Audiences will move through several distinctive spaces and encounter a cast of characters, from virtual representations of real-life volunteer firefighters to animated wildlife.
Co-director Dr Robert Walton said Flashover is a new kind of experience that uses novel emerging technologies to show the world in a way that most people will not have seen before.
“Flashover finds a new visual language for piecing together the fragmented memories of trauma with the indifference and terrifying ferocity of fire,” said Dr Walton.
“It creates a space for audiences to contemplate the ‘fight’ with fire, to find beauty in this terrible fate we’ve brought upon ourselves, and to come to terms with the devastation we’re living through — the emergency of our times, which will increasingly impact our ways of life over the coming century.”
Co-director Dr CJ Taylor, who is a volunteer firefighter and has experienced a flashover firsthand, said Flashover will challenge audiences to sit with the stark realities of the climate emergency and decide how to take action.
“From a climate point of view, we occupy a world that is at a tipping point — fires in particular are burning hotter, faster, and more frequently,” said Dr Taylor.
“Flashover intentionally doesn't provide you with any answers — instead it asks questions. We want to reignite conversations around what it means to be living at this point in time, and what we as individuals and collectives can do.”
This project was primarily supported by a 2022 grant from the Commonwealth Department of Education, Skills and Employment to support research, education and training in the growing area of Virtual Production, in partnership with NantStudios in Docklands (Melbourne).
For more information, watch a segment on the ABC’s 7.30 Report about the exhibition.
The Faculty of Fine Arts and Music offers short courses in Virtual Production. Find out more about studying Film and Television at the Victorian College of the Arts