ARia: Song Unseen is an augmented reality experience that invites audiences to navigate the entangled relationships between human and non-human worlds. Drawing on the ecological and symbolic presence of Moreton Bay fig trees in Hyde Park/ Boodjamooling, the work explores the complex impacts of species relocation, global mobility and environmental disruption traced most recently through the arrival of the polyphagous, the shot-hole borer. As augmented visuals and soundscapes unfold, they reveal how ecological change, often set in motion by colonial and global forces, accumulates over time  as a form of slow violence. This work asks: in the face of such layered devastation, how can we collaborate – across species – to imagine new futures?

Catherine Gough-Brady, W. Sze Tsang and Cassandra Tytler are award-winning artists who collaborate to produce site-responsive, audio-visual works that explore intersections of place, people and ecology. Working with software developer Kim Smith, the team draws on digital and participatory practices spanning sound art, screen-based media, performance and installation. The artists have previously addressed feminist approaches to human-non-human relationships. ARia: Song Unseen marks their first collaborative exploration into interspecies impact and ecological transformation within both local and global contexts.

Cassandra Tytler works across video, performance, and site-specific practices. Her art and scholarship explore the performance of the audio-visual as a relational politics of resistance to normalising narratives of exclusion. With an unsettling, wry humour and a playful sensibility, she works from feminist, ecosocial, and anti-colonialist positions. Originally from Naarm/Melbourne, she moved to Boorloo/Perth in 2023 as a Forrest Creative & Performance Fellow with the Centre for People, Place and Planet, ECU, and as a postdoctoral fellow in Wellbeing and Education. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and performed nationally and internationally.

W. Sze Tsang is a researcher, performer and audio-visual artist who explores the intersections of history, place and self through digital technologies. Sze creates work using aspects of place – such as field recordings, maps and information sourced from geospatial and weather datasets – alongside personal reflections as ways of exploring the multi-layered intersections between time, history, ecology and geographical features. Through exposing the multiple layers of narrative that inform place, Sze’s works invite unearthings of the past, meditations on the present and contemplations of the future.

Catherine Gough-Brady is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and senior lecturer in Screen Production at Edith Cowan University. She has produced and directed six documentary series for ABC TV—including Legal Briefs (2016), Ethics Matters (2017), and The Communicator (2022)—as well as eleven radio features for ABC Radio National. Her art films, which explore our relationship with the non-human, have screened internationally in galleries. Catherine’s research focuses on the relational nature of documentary production, and her writing has been published in Media Practice and Education, Screenworks, [in]Transition, Cultural Geographies, and The International Journal of Creative Media Research. She is co-editor of the volume Constructing the Real (2023) and serves as associate editor of Screenworks.

Catherine is particularly interested in subverting the humancentric assumptions embedded in film language asking, for example, what an over-the-shoulder shot between trees might look like, or how a mid-shot could frame a mountain. Her recent work explores the constructive and destructive impacts of mobility—of people, animals, and plants—on the environments they move through.

Kim Smith is a technical artist and software developer based in Boorloo/Perth, and the founder and general manager of the games studio GamesSmiths. Influenced by magic realism and fantasy horror, Kim’s practice extends the everyday into the cyber-verse through the creation of mixed reality experiences. He was the mixed reality developer on BoodjAR for the 10 Nights in Port Festival (2024), collaborating with Voyant AR Director Natalie Marinho and other developers to augment reality with ‘katadjin’ shared by Wadjuk Elders. Kim also served as technical artist on Nazerul Ben-Dzulkefli’s Trans-Oceanic Spectres (2022) during PICA’s Hackathon. His work with Perth-based software company Sentient has been implemented across Western Australia in VR training environments, improving safety and accessibility on mine sites and contributing to the reduction of human error and fatalities.

Tom Mùller is an established multi-disciplinary artist with an active international practice spanning the realms of site-responsive, temporal and permanent projects. His work has been included in major exhibitions, including, Carriageworks; The National, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; Art Gallery of South Australia and the upcoming Northern Alps Triennale in Japan. Tom has been the recipient of multiple Australia Council grants and the inaugural winner of the Qantas Contemporary Art Prize, a mid-career fellowship from the Department of Culture and the Arts. In 2009 he was the recipient of ArtSource’s Basel international residency program through the Christoph Merian Stiftung. Tom has been mentored by the Russian American conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov and studied anthroposophy at Emerson College in London. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) from Curtin University of Technology, Perth/Boorloo. Tom is the chair of the Freemantle Culture Council and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Fremantle Biennale.

Images: Cassandra Tytler, Catherine Gough-Brady and Wing Sze Tsang, Aria Song Unseen, boorda yeyi Intensive Mentorship Open Studio, 2025, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Courtesy of the artist. boorda yeyi Intensive Mentorship Open Studio, 2025, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Photo: Tristan McKenzie.

Header Image: Catherine Gough-Brady, W. Sze Tsang and Cassandra Tytler, ‘ARia Song Unseen’, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.