SKYBOX (2026), Realm Artspace, Ringwood Library

We know that the uses of most information are flexible, different pieces of ground telling different stories to different people. Skybox is an exploration of the way our perception of the world (and ourselves) is mediated by data and technology.

The ‘skybox’ is an early 3D technique used to create large vistas or skylines for the backgrounds of video games. With cheats or by changing the game's code, players can fly out of their level, towards the skybox. This shift in perspective interrogates the rules and laws of the world, its authenticity and ideologies - like surveying a city from a great height.

With every street view update, higher fidelity 3D models of cities, cheaper and more accessible drone technology, better facial recognition and location tracking, the way we perceive the world

around us (and the way it perceives us) changes. Virtual worlds evolve to become more believable and 'real' with high-definition graphics and design tricks that subtly influence how people think and act.

While location coordinates and maps offer hard data, they cannot capture the lived experiences, memories, and histories that transform a location into a home. Anchoring the

project in the familiar, maps of Ringwood and 3D scans of the Realm building have been layered into the video. Skybox interrogates our relationship to place and the invisible forces that shape our sense of belonging.

-Rel Pham, 2026

Skybox is a video installation created by artist Rel Pham for ArtSpace at Realm, examining what it means to observe and exist in a deluge of data.

This work explores the way data informs and shapes our experience of the world through near-constant observation of natural and built environments, harvested through diverse data collection points and techniques.

The video gaming term ‘skybox’ refers to the scaling up of a 3D diorama to create the sky or world around a player. Referencing video games, the natural world and architecture (including the signature Realm building in Ringwood), Rel reassembles and repurposes these domains through a combination of the real and unreal.

In an era where online images and videos are plentiful but often ripped and remixed from their context, Skybox likewise plays with the relationship between data and image. The resulting hypnotic visuals subvert the rigidity of the objective and the romantics of the subjective.

Combining images of overhead photograph of the Ringwood area, computer generated artificial landscapes, 3D scans and decimated 3D geometry - Rel Pham collides cold hard data with abstraction to explore the many representations of our world we are faced with. The artifice they are based on; from predictive pathfinding to the arbitrary drawing of territories to define nation states.

Skybox also included a children’s drawing workshop exploring imaginary worlds and alternate realities made from our own personal experience. This was done through us collectively drawing our favourite places and items and combining them into kaleidoscopic collage drawings.

With thanks to Realm Artspace, Ringwood Council, Rosemary Joy and Dave Court