A LARGE Australian contingent came out in the sweltering Venetian heat to celebrate the opening of the Australian Pavilion at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale.

With Now + When, this year’s creative directors, John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec, offer an intense immersive sensory experience. The exhibition explores the potential of advanced stereoscopic projection, developed by Gollings (photographs) and Flood Slicer (renders) to show Australia’s current and potential urban environments.

To accommodate these projections, the Australian Pavilion is once again treated as a black box, literally and conceptually. To seal the pavilion from the light outside, visitors were admitted in small groups. Those exiting the pavilion created a buzz of excitement among those yet to enter. The play between two and three dimensions began on the pavilion exterior, with orange lines and wire frames set against the pavilion’s black walls, shifting spatial perception. This continued on entering, leading one toward the first of two large screens, and a set of 3D glasses hanging from the ceiling. Here were projected an extensive, alternating series of John Gollings’ magnificent aerial stereoscopic photographs of Australian cities and massive outback mining landscapes. The latter were particularly striking because these enormous constructions are largely unknown.

Another set of glasses greeted visitors moving to the lower level of the pavilion, who could then view the second set of images – the when of Australian urbanism. This screen seamlessly presented an animated sequence of seventeen propositions by Australian architects, selected though competition, which project various speculative urban futures for Australian cities. The images were diverse and intriguing, but to find out who did them, and with what intent or rationale, one has to purchase the catalogue. As a consequence, viewers must do some projecting and speculating of their own.

The glasses being fixed to the ceiling means that adult viewers have to stand still. Children were luckier – allowed one of the few pairs of non-attached glasses, they could move up and down, around and about as they attempted to interact physically with the cities that seemed to move out of the screen towards them. I am sure many adults would have liked to chase the images, too – had not wires and decorum anchored them to the spot.

But vision was not the only sense brought into play, the soundscape by Nick Murray was a highly effective accompaniment, which also seemed to affect one physically.

It seemed appropriate that these contemporary explorations of the potential for projecting between two and three dimensions should be first presented in Venice, the city which also houses the fabulous perspectival play of the Renaissance façade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco (now the Ospedale).

Venezia, the Hospital, housed in a Renaissance former guild-hall building beside the Basilica dei santi Giovanni e Paolo. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, July 2, 2006. (detail)