Friends with Computers—April Phillips (Wiradjuri-Scottish), Jordan East and Pat Younis—create deeply sensory, immersive installations that merge First Nations knowledge, science and poetic computation. Presented as the first boorda yeyi Immersive Arts Commission, Under Waters carries audiences into a speculative past, 500 million years before our own, when saltwater stretched across most of the Earth’s surface. The installation celebrates water as a key element of life, opening a portal into deep time where oceanic and celestial realms entwine.
Visitors are invited to slow down and dwell within a living, generative environment that reshapes itself in response to their presence. Through real-time body tracking, each person’s silhouette becomes mirrored in the digital realm—reformed as a shell. Immersed within the continuum of an ancient saltwater wonderland and vast sky Country, audiences become inhabitants—activating the world around them through their movement and attentiveness.
Building on the group’s earlier collaborations (including kajoo yannaga (Come on, Let’s Walk Together), presented at ACMI / Now or Never in 2024), the artists continue their practice of creating interactive worlds using game engines, photogrammetry and generative sound in close dialogue with community. Under Waters draws on cultural reciprocity and deep respect for Country, with contributions from First Nations performers Shantai Abdul-Rahman (Wiradjuri) and Sam Walker (Ngarluma), and connections to Xenophora shell collections from the Dampier Archipelago held at WA Museum Boola Bardip.
Under Waters Merch
Shop an limited run of Under Waters tees, now available in the PICA Shop or online.
Friends With Friends PICA Art Talks Videos
Under Waters Learning Resources
About the artists
April Phillips is a Wiradjuri–Scottish woman of the Galari/Kalari peoples, living and working on Yuin Country, South Coast NSW. Her practice is grounded in futurism and media arts, spanning moving image, printmaking, illustration, 3D assets, AR research and photogrammetry. Drawing equally on analogue processes and emergent technologies, Phillips explores kinship, place and techno-poetics, often leading collaborative teams to realise ambitious, interdisciplinary projects.
Phillips graduated with a degree in Creative Arts and Design from Charles Sturt University in 2018; undertook field research in Malta; and completed advanced training in augmented reality at the School for Poetic Computation in New York in 2021.
She has presented significant solo exhibitions including Drop Let, Australian Design Centre, Sydney; Blak Dot, Melbourne; and Next Wave, Melbourne (2025); LOOK ▷ SEE, Melbourne International Film Festival (2024); kajoo yannaga (Come on, Let’s Walk Together), ACMI / Now or Never, Melbourne (2024); and Body Place, Bankstown Arts Centre/Utp, Sydney (2024). Major commissions include Body Place, Bankstown Arts Centre, Sydney (2024); Blooms + Bugs, Canberra University Hospital (2024); and Jacky Winter Waters, Walkerville North, Victoria (2021). She has also exhibited internationally at World Expo Osaka (2025), SXSW Sydney (2025), MODE Festival, Cockatoo Island, Sydney (2025) and Neurotitan Gallery, Berlin (2019).
Recognised for her leadership in digital arts, Phillips was named Rising Star of the Year by Women in Digital (2023) and received the Melbourne International Film Festival Uncle Jack Charles Award (2024) for her work kajoo yannaga, developed in collaboration with Now or Never Festival, ACMI and RMIT. Her commitment to cross-disciplinary innovation has been supported through major residencies and fellowships, including the Australian Council for the Arts Digital Fellowship (2022), Megalo Print Studio, Canberra (2022) and Arteles, Finland (2014). Further recognition has come through national prizes, as finalist for the Fremantle Print Prize (2025) and Gosford Moving Image Award (2025).
Most recently she was awarded both Creative Australia’s 2025 Emerging and Experimental Arts Fellowship, affirming her position as one of Australia’s most rapidly evolving contemporary media artists. As a founding member of the Friends with Computers collective, Phillips playfully engages digital technologies as tools for art making, with a focus on futurism, human intelligence and ethical methodologies.
Pat Younis is a real-time artist and Virtual Art Director whose practice moves fluidly across film, contemporary art and music. Since 2018, he has specialised in interactive technologies such as Unreal Engine, working within Virtual Art Departments for major film productions while collaborating with artists on immersive installations and musicians on live visual environments. His work translates creative ideas into tangible virtual realities, positioning real-time space as a site for both technical problem-solving and aesthetic innovation. A longstanding passion for video game technologies informs his hybrid practice, which reimagines the tools as platforms for storytelling, experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Through this approach, Younis contributes to a growing global community of artists and technologists shaping the future of digital culture.
Jordan East is a media artist working in Sydney, on the lands of the Gadigal and Wangal peoples. His practice explores the relationship between technology and music through immersive video and augmented physical environments. Spanning video, projection, interactive installation and theatre, his projects often evolve in collaboration with improvisational musicians. At the intersection of experimental electronic music and moving image, his projects interface performers and audiences with technology through sensors and responsive systems. His process employs procedural animation, photogrammetry, real-time generative methods and emerging digital workflows to blur the boundaries between physical and virtual worlds.
