Escher X nendo | Between Two Worlds multimedia tour

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Escher X nendo | Between Two Worlds was a groundbreaking exhibition presented by the NGV that featured the work of Dutch artist M. C. Escher in dialogue with the work of acclaimed Japanese design studio nendo. This first major exhibition of Escher’s work in Australia gave a comprehensive survey of Escher’s unique vision through some 160 artworks borrowed from The Netherlands’s Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. In an unprecedented pairing, the NGV invited Oki Sato, principal of nendo, to develop immersive spatial interiors in response to Escher’s oeuvre. Both practitioners share an obsession with spatial manipulation and optical illusions. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: I was researcher and scriptwriter of an 8,000-word manuscript for the exhibition tour/podcast. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The 60-minute podcast drew together techniques from art and design history and criticism, documentary filmmaking, scriptwriting, and radio and podcast production. The content demanded a robust understanding of art and design scholarship, with all content peer-reviewed by Cathy Leahy, NGV Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Ewan McEoin, NGV Senior Curator of Contemporary Design and Architecture, as well as by Oki Sato and the nendo studio. The creative work had an audience of 8,342 through iPod devices hired onsite, with numbers significantly increased by downloads (numbers unavailable) from the NGV’s microsite, which remains as a project archive into the future. The tour was also available in Auslan, Mandarin and transcript versions. The script was narrated by Eddie Woo, a high school maths teacher who won the 2018 Australia's Local Hero Award for his WooTube initiative.