Artists: Kate Richards & Ross Gibson

Designer: Aaron Seymour

Programmers: Daniel Heckenberg, Jon Drummond

Sound Design: Greg White

Interactive installation - Part of the 'Life After Wartime' suite, 'Bystander' is a 5-channel interactive software system. The work is installed in a 7-metre-wide pentagonal frame comprised of five projection-screens and surround sound audio which visitors enter – up to 10 at once. All round them, a spirit-world of images, texts and sound gets composed in response to their movement, mass and attentiveness. The room is a kind of performative story-generator haunted by Sydney’s recent past. Depending on the behaviour of visitors, a variable and volatile world of audiovisual narrative evolves endlessly but cogently. Bystander exhibits emergent behaviours – complex narrative, aesthetic and semantic patterns emerge out of simple, elegant rules and interface.

- text taken from Kate Richard's website, 2014