Diagrammatica — Melbourne / Wellington

2022 – Ongoing

Diagrammatica is a large-scale participatory artwork that transforms public space into a live, continually changing diagram.

Across two connected environments, people can watch an unfolding film and soundscape, follow its source and enter the space in which it is being made. Inside, small groups arrange hundreds of sculptural fragments. Their actions are filmed, transformed and transmitted back into the public space. Musicians respond to the image as an evolving graphic score.

Diagrammatica is at once a public installation, live drawing, durational performance, improvised concert and evolving archive. It has no fixed composition and no single division between artist and audience. The work exists through the relationships between its participants, collaborators, technologies and the site.

In 2026, Diagrammatica received the Green Room Award for Outstanding Work in Contemporary and Experimental Performance, with nominations for Outstanding Design and Outstanding Technical Achievement.

Making Space For Not Knowing

Diagrammatica began with diagrams: the visual languages physics, astronomy and music use to make unseen relationships thinkable. The project asks what happens when a diagram is no longer an image of a system, but becomes the system itself: something people can enter, handle, listen to and change.

Over three years, Strange Engine developed this proposition through sculpture, live image, spatial sound, improvised music and hosting. Knowledge is not held by any single object or discipline. It is relationally dispersed, emerging in the shifting spaces between sound, image, objects, site and people.

Nothing resolves into a final picture. Diagrammatica remains in motion, always reaching for meaning: a collective search for cosmology and connection.

Federation Square: Two Connecting Worlds

The first full public version was produced by Strange Engine with RISING and Fed Square in June 2025.

Above ground, a former shop in Fed Square’s Atrium became a free public cinema. Passersby encountered a fluid collision of live image and sound without initially knowing where it came from.

Three storeys below was Slot 9, an almost 50-metre concrete chamber buried between railway lines.

Every hour, a group of strangers was welcomed and led away from the familiar civic space, through locked doors and industrial corridors, and down into the bunker.

The journey was part of the work.

Participants were given time to watch, handle the components and become curious. They put on white coveralls and tool belts. They were reassured that nothing they could make was wrong. They entered together.

Hosting The Threshold

Participation can easily become another demand placed on an audience. Diagrammatica approaches it differently.

Nobody has to enter. Someone can watch the film for five minutes, lie on the floor and listen, return another day or choose to descend into the system. Each level of engagement is complete in itself.

For those who enter, hosting is a core artistic method. The hosts welcome, orient and pay attention. They offer possibilities rather than instructions. They step forward when uncertainty becomes inhibiting and withdraw when a group finds its own momentum.

The aim is not to tell people what to do. It is to create enough trust for them to discover what they can do.

Film And Sound

Rhian Hinkley (Diagrammatica film design), created a bespoke live camera process that bends time, movement and perspective. Actions are layered, delayed and returned to the space. A hand or object can appear in several moments at once. Physical activity becomes something between film, drawing and a moving painting, continually responsive but increasingly uncertain as an image of reality.

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey (Diagrammatica sound design), developed an equally responsive sonic architecture. Their custom, hyper-directional system takes information from the changing visual field and transforms it into sound distributed through the site. It also provides the platform through which guest musicians improvise.

A Platform For Other Artists

Central to Diagrammatica is its capacity to hold other artistic practices. It is not a closed composition, but a responsive platform that guest artists can enter, inhabit and change. Each brings another way of listening and making. A shift in rhythm, density or restraint moves through the sound, image, space and participants, altering the work as a whole.

These collaborations are not an accompanying program. They are part of how Diagrammatica thinks.

Across the Melbourne season, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey were joined by Golden Sands / Moses Carr & Ohmi (Lachlan Thompson) / Nadav Rayman / Aaron Wyatt / Kaylie Melville / Mindy Meng Wang / JP Shilo / Helen Svoboda / Flora Carbo & Winter McQuinn / Cat Hope / Genevieve Lacey & Marshall McGuire.