Billions of years of Albany’s history will unfold before audiences at the Albany Town Hall, where ancient landscapes, shifting climates and the forces that shaped the region will be brought to life through art, music and technology.
An art-science exhibition, Numen is a multimedia song cycle exploring the origins, climate and landscapes of Albany and the Great Southern.
Created by Albany-based media artist Peter Morse, the exhibition includes an original musical score by WA composers Glenn Rogers and Steve Richter.
The immersive experience combines computer visualisations, satellite data, climate and geophysical simulations and an original musical score to explore Albany and the Great Southern region across extraordinary scales of time and space.
Presented across three large screens, six audiovisual compositions journey from the formation of the Solar System and early life through Deep Time evolution of landscape and into imagined futures.
The work also includes Menang-Noongar language and the six Noongar seasons of Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba and Kambarang alongside contemporary scientific understandings of country.
Morse said his scientific background enabled him to use data in a creative way, offering a new perspective on the Great Southern.
“It looks at the history of Albany-Kinjarling and the Great Southern Region across billions of years and you can get (scientific) data sets to tell a story these days,” he said.
“It ranges from astrophysical visualisation to visualisation of the formation of the Earth’s surfaces, the movements of Earth’s continents over hundreds of millions of years, and then I used a computer simulation of the city from satellite data and other data sources over the last 200 years.
“We then used artificial intelligence or generative AI techniques to look at the future of the region.
“This is the story we can tell through data.”
Albany mayor Greg Stocks said Numen offered audiences a unique opportunity to experience the Albany landscape from a different perspective.
“Albany 2026 has provided an opportunity to explore the many layers of our place and the stories that have shaped it, and Numen takes that exploration to an extraordinary scale,” he said.
“Bringing together art, science, technology and culture, this work encourages us to consider the landscape we know today as part of a much bigger story stretching billions of years into the past and future.”
Morse said “it means a great deal” to have Numen featured in Albany’s bicentenary celebrations, having first formed a connection with the city through childhood holidays before eventually returning to live and work in the region.
“It’s been great to come back here after many decades away and reconnect with those memories of my youth but also coming with a very different perspective as somebody with a geophysics background and as someone who is interested in heritage visualisation and astronomy,” he said.
Numen will be presented at the Albany Town Hall from September 17 to October 14, with daily screenings at 10.30am, 1pm and 3.30pm.
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