The Body Electric with The Refinery
Artist Amanda Bennetts dives beneath the surface in more ways than one in her Urban Ecologies residency, writes Rebecca Jamieson Dwyer.
If you’ve ever sent an email, streamed a song, or watched a video on the Sunshine Coast, there’s a good chance your data zipped silently along a 550-kilometre-long undersea cable – a fibre-optic umbilical cord that links Maroochydore to the rest of the world.
You can’t see it. You can’t hear it. You wouldn’t know it’s there, buried beneath 10 metres of sand. But for local artist Amanda Bennetts, this largely invisible infrastructure has become a powerful site for creative interrogation – a way to explore the space between the physical and digital body, between health and technology, and between what’s seen and what’s not.
“It’s about making the invisible visible,” Amanda said. “The cable is such a physical, tangible object, but so few people even know it’s there or think about how it affects their lives.”
Amanda’s new video work, developed through professional development program The Refinery’s
R|Urban Ecologies residency, is unlike anything the Sunshine Coast has seen.
Informed by months of research and her lived experience of chronic illness, the piece blends cinematic horror-film elements, data visualisation, movement performance, and original sound design to explore how our digital selves are constructed – and constrained – by the systems around us.
“I became really interested in the idea of the data body,” she explains. “There’s this whole parallel version of us online being shaped and monitored constantly – but it doesn’t reflect the day-to-day, lived experience of being in a body. Especially not one with a disability or illness.”
Amanda has multiple sclerosis and a rare muscle disease, both of which influence her creative practice – not just thematically, but physically. During filming, she used a rollator to walk the two kilometre stretch between the Maroochydore data centre and the cable’s beach landing point, retracing the buried line that silently carries our lives across the ocean at 36 terabits per second.
It’s part performance, part meditation – all housed in a 12-minute film that Amanda says is best experienced like immersive cinema.
“It felt important to make it something everyone could attend, including people with wheelchairs or other access needs,” she said. “We’ve built this digital world that’s supposed to connect us, but it often leaves people out. I wanted this work to push back against that.”
The film was born from a very analogue feeling: creative uncertainty. After spending a year in Austria working with Ars Electronica, one of the world’s leading art and science institutions, Amanda returned home to Pomona wondering if the Sunshine Coast could possibly support the kind of work she wanted to make.
“I thought I’d need to base my practice in Sydney, Melbourne or Europe,” she said. “But then I saw the callout for Urban Ecologies and thought, ‘Wow, this is happening on my doorstep?’”
The Refinery’s Urban Ecologies initiative is run by the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance (SCCA) and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and UniSC, and is designed to champion artists who are engaging with art, technology, the environment and the community in fresh, critical ways.
“There’s this really exciting push on the Coast at the moment, especially from people like Dr Leah Barclay at UniSC and Megan Williams from SCCA to build up an art, tech and science hub,” she said. “That’s not something you usually find in regional areas, and it’s so needed.”
Amanda’s residency also connected her with a team of local videographers, composers, sound designers and a movement coach who helped shape her slow, deliberate choreography on screen. The result is eerie and arresting – drawing you into the strange, surreal terrain of contemporary digital life.
In a world of AI wellness apps, health tracking devices, and algorithmically curated everything, Amanda’s work asks: Who gets to be seen? Who gets access? And what do we lose when our identities are flattened into data?
“There’s so much hype around AI in health, and while some of it is exciting, there are massive ethical concerns too,” she said. “Most of the data it’s built on comes from already sick people. Who owns that? How can it benefit more people? These are questions we need to be asking.”
With the support of The Refinery, Amanda was given the freedom to follow her curiosity – not toward a neatly resolved answer, but into a deeper conversation.
“I didn’t know what the work would be when I started,” she said. “But SCCA and UniSC were so supportive. It was about following an idea and seeing where it went.”
That idea has now taken her full circle: she’ll return to Austria in October for a new residency exploring healing aquifers, salt mines and sauna culture – using data from her own body to consider the overlaps between wellness, landscape and tech.
And as for the undersea cable?
“There’s possibly more work to come on that,” Amanda shared. “I think it’s a really interesting way to think about connection – not just locally, but globally – and how it affects us, both in good ways and bad. We’re all wired into it, whether we realise it or not.”
THE REFINERY: WHAT’S ON
Masterclass with Cameron Deyell
UniSC Sippy Downs
Sunday 20 July – ticketed event.
Learn from composer, performer, producer and ocean sailor Cameron Deyell in this hands-on-masterclass
on commercial songwriting, field recordings and the rewilding of the studio.
R|7.0 Showcase
The Events Centre Caloundra
Wed 10 September – tickets on sale in August. Hear from R|7.0’s Creative Business Incubator cohort as they pitch their creative practices culminating in a 10-week program
Visit therefinerysunshinecoast.com to find out more about The Refinery and to book tickets.
