What happens when the internet’s favourite animal becomes the audience?
Step into a looping, hypnotic world of cats watching themselves as Cat Island transforms Science Gallery Melbourne’s Digital Bricks into a layered, meme-within-a-meme experience.
Created by Naarm-based artist Jen Valender, Cat Island begins on Ainoshima Island in Japan – often called “Cat Heaven Island” – where semi-feral cats live largely untouched by screens. Filming playful encounters with these cats, Valender then returned the footage to them, capturing their reactions as they watched themselves on digital displays for the first time. The result is an intricate feedback loop: cats observing cats, curiosity reflecting back on itself.
This multi-channel work of 81 cat videos now features across the Digital Bricks surrounding the Grattan St entrance to the gallery.
See more of Cat Island inside the DISTRACTION exhibition, where audiences are invited to take part: strike your best cat pose and flip the perspective into “cat vision,” informed by animal sensory perception research from the University of Melbourne’s Stuart-Fox Lab.
About the artist
Jen Valender (NZ/AUS) is an Australasian artist who was born in Aotearoa New Zealand and is based in Naarm Melbourne, Australia. She creates performative encounters on and with the landscape that raise questions about the relationship between art and the natural world. Through film, performance, sculpture, and sound artworks, Valender explores the ways in which art may be used to investigate and navigate human and nonhuman connections.
Science Gallery Melbourne’s Digital Bricks are over 200 LED screens embedded behind glass bricks, forming the largest combined pixel display in the Southern Hemisphere. Learn more.
