Vernon Ah Kee, way to be, 2024. Production still. Courtesy: the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, and NorthSite Contemporary Arts, Cairns.

way to be, featuring work by Vernon Ah Kee, explores the way in which we view and interact with cultural heritage sites such as the Western Yalanji galleries, using various technologies including augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

way to be provides an opportunity to demonstrate to different audiences, new ideas and fresh conversations about the way to think about rock art. Ideas of rock art exist generally through the lens of tourism and ‘the colonial’. For many audiences, rock art is an abstract to a perceived ‘ancient’ society.

way to be seeks to provide a new lens and new way of engaging with data-sets through various technology lenses. These new ways of seeing and being include seeing data through multi-spectral colour analysis, ground-penetrating lasers that provide new ways of looking at the surrounding terrain, and see what impact ochre has on the terrain, and an examination to identify any traces of biological matter and DNA.

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