In this MProjects specially designed for MPavilion 2017, artist and experimental architect Matthew Bird transformed MPavilion into an interactive installation, inviting audiences to experience an immersive and performative encounter with the afterlife.

Multidimensional in nature, the project sought to challenge aesthetic, cultural and behavioural concerns, rendering Bird’s creative curiosities of esoteric and metaphysical space. The installation was composed of a celestial field of reimagined bells that produced chance and compositional harmonies, inviting playful audience manipulation, and culminated in a series of commissioned performances in collaboration with composer Daniel Jenatsch, choreographic artist Phillip Adams and fashion designer Pia Interlandi.

Over the course of its (after)life at MPavilion, seven local, emerging and established performers activated the installation: Emma Riches, Tom Woodman, Rachael Wisby, Luke Fryer, Ben Hurley, Pia Lauritz and Timothy Walsh.

Programmed around this immersive installation were a series of twilight performance encounters, a public talk and the launch of Monash University’s newly formed urban research lab ‘The Afterlives of Cities’, with Matthew Bird; astrophysicist Daniel Price; architect and urbanist Charity Edwards; and architect and VR expert Tom Morgan.