Deep Time Real Time: The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition
24.02.2025 – 16.05.2025

Deep Time Real Time: The 2025 Alastair Swayn Legacy Exhibition explores the relationship between design and planetary systems through two opposing temporal scales – ‘deep time’ and ‘real time’.

As global citizens, we struggle to reconcile this geological timescale with our everyday lives. This affects our time-based thinking, limiting our ability to make decisions on regenerative actions and to develop collective societal and design responses to the complex challenges of our planet.

Today, technology offers new ways of seeing and knowing information that enable us to better understand the entangled, inter-relational and hidden conditions of our world.

Technology is, however, never a neutral actor. An inherent conflict lies in the fact that many of the most innovative technologies are designed and used for military applications, or the exploration and extraction of resources. This uneasy foundation makes it imperative that we critically question how these tools and practices are utilised – and for whose benefit.

Indeed, through creative ingenuity these very same technologies are being re-designed, hacked and re-deployed to support the repair, regeneration and preservation of ecologies. These adaptive and opportunistic processes are enabling new time-based thinking and spatial practices to emerge.

Deep Time Real Time reveals the agency of time-based thinking and foregrounds a research-led approach to design and creative practice. The exhibition is centred around a large-scale installation by architecture practice Simulaa, comprising a ‘timeline’ of digital, geological and material samples that visualises the journey of materials through time.

A series of architects, designers and artists have been invited to respond, creating a collection of time-based creative and research works presented through the lenses of ecology, energy and technology.

Deep Time Real Time invites visitors to consider the complexity of these intersecting concerns, and to situate themselves in relation to the distant past and the far future.

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Deep Time Real Time features creative works and research from Fayen d'Evie, Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen, Alicia Frankovich, Emma Jackson, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Nicholas Mangan and Cameron Allan McKean, Joel Sherwood Spring and Simulaa.

Creative direction by Fleur Watson. Co-curated by André Bonnice, Anna Jankovic and Fleur Watson. Exhibition design by Simulaa. Graphic design by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen. Access consultancy by Access Lab & Library (ALL).

This exhibition is produced by RMIT Culture in partnership with the RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design and with the assistance of The Swayn Gallery of Australian Design. Find out more at alastairswaynfoundation.org. Also supported by the Victorian Government, with core specimens supplied by the State Drill Core Library.