Skybox

Next date: Monday, 02 February 2026 | 09:00 AM to Sunday, 15 March 2026 | 05:00 PM

Skybox is a powerful new immersive video installation created by artist Rel Pham especially 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.

About the artist

Rel Pham is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist, designer, animator and illustrator known for his signature electric, vibrant colours and a penchant for surrealism. Drawing upon old world fables and rituals for thematic inspiration, Pham explores the interconnected nature of our current physical and digital realities through screen-based video, animation and installation. Pham creates hybrid worlds in an illuminated palette of neon PC coolant fluid and radiant LED lights. He flattens our past, present and future to demystify the invisible numbers that surround everyday life, exposing the programmed spectres haunting our data through cautionary tales of being intrinsically connected online. 

Rel has presented solo exhibitions and commissions including Hyperthread, National Communication Museum (2024), TEMPLE, Melbourne Now, NGV (2023), TORRENT, The Bridge, Kingston (2022) and Electric Dirge, 4A Digital, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2021). He was the winner of the inaugural White Rabbit Gallery Digital Call-Out in 2025 with the judges praising his work’s “exceptional technical skill, bold production quality, and powerful conceptual depth”.

Further information

For more information please contact Council on 1300 88 22 33 or email arts@maroondah.vic.gov.au.

When

Location

ArtSpace at Realm, 179 Maroondah Highway, Ringwood, 3134, View map