‘Hydrogen Narcosis’ is a video collage of deflated, discarded balloons, illustration and animation. In this new work, Shae Rooke and Jess Dubblu have created a familiar yet surreal underwater landscape, complete with organisms and habitats. 

Hydrogen Narcosis (aka the bends) is a disorienting, hallucinatory state experienced by humans breathing hydrogen at high pressures, usually only occurring when underwater diving. Rooke and Dubblu’s psychedelic animation  dives and spirals through their invented coral gardens and rocky outcrops, following colourful creatures downward to a volcanic centre. Pillow lava, the distinctive lava forms shaped by water, melts, morphs and solidifies into new  abstract structures. 

This underwater world, merges binaries between natural and synthetic environments. Is a world created from balloons any less real than one made of silica? Is a hallucination any less of a perception? ‘Hydrogen Narcosis’ is also an ode to the tropes and techniques used in cinematic and documentary representations of the ocean. They plunge the well worn path from the waters surface, to the ocean floor, into an imagined version of what could exist in its depths.