A house is never the same after a river runs through it. In The World Came Flooding In, lost objects and spaces are recreated by the artists in collaboration with flood affected people. Virtual reality, projections, miniatures, photographs and sound are thoughtfully orchestrated, exploring the rich inner world that remains when everything has been washed away.

The result is an evocative and wondrous tour through memory spaces. This is a lyrical and unique experiential work that explores personal memory, grief and loss, and the shared experience of an extreme climate event.

— Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine

As Lead Developer, my role was to put the technology directly in the artists’ hands. Rather than building the experience for them, I built the tools and workflows that let Isobel and Van work inside Unity themselves — shaping their miniature memory rooms into navigable virtual reality, iterating on their own vision, and making creative decisions without a developer in the loop. I set up the XR framework, smoothed the photogrammetry pipeline, and fixed bugs along the way, but the work was always about enabling and empowering the artists to author their own world.

The World Came Flooding In had its world premiere at ACMI, presented by Melbourne International Film Festival and Now or Never Festival, Melbourne, in 2025. It has since won Best Interactive/Immersive Documentary at the 2026 AIDC Awards and the Lumine Award for Best Virtual Reality Work at Tricky Women Tricky Realities, with exhibitions including IFFR Rotterdam, New Images Paris, Annecy Festival and Doxumentale Berlin.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program. Developed with the assistance of Frame Documentary. Produced with the assistance of VicScreen. Principal production funding from Screen Australia. A Film Camp production.

All images courtesy of Isobel Knowles & Van Sowerwine.