Abstract
Blogs written during residency for Schmidt Ocean Institute.
For Schmidt Ocean Institute we created an artwork that utilizes footage collected on the ROV SuBastian using URI and Harvard’s RAD Sampler and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s Deep PIV in combination with artistic fieldwork completed on location to create a contemporary, multimedia version of a cabinet of curiosity/wunderkammer that presents a collection of images, artifacts, and impressions from the oceanic water column.
In their original form, enlightenment-era cabinets of curiosity presented natural and man made objects, artifacts, and artworks in one space in order to articulate a specific vision or model of a dynamic and transforming natural history. Often considered the precursors to natural history museums, they created analogies and relationships between artifacts or representations of the natural world, and served as the starting point for speculations on philosophy, science and natural history. Often these collections provided the first glimpses of new species, or relayed images, renderings or accounts collected from unexplored or distant regions of the world, presenting the work of artists and scientists within the same space.
We considered Falkor as a species along with gelatinous animals or larvaceans we will come across in the midwaters off the coast of San Diego. We are inspired by Jules Verne’s description of Captain Nemo’s submarine the Nautilus, which was mistaken for a sea monster in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
We reflected on notions of home, community, survival, adaptation, and protection, and to think of planet Earth as one big habitat. Exploring the similarities between the Falkor, SuBastian, and the organisms that inhabit the Twilight Zone. For example, comparing the sophisticated communication technologies on board the Falkor to those of bioluminescence and the variety of sensors (lidar, etc) mirroring natural sensing systems such as tentacles. Comparing cycles that take place on the ship, such as ballast water and food recycling, to carbon cycling or other processes used by siphonophores to propel and orient themselves in the water column.
We constructed systems for observing these phenomena, and new media to document our discoveries. We documented everything on, in, and above the water column site: ocean, boat, scientists, jellyfish,the otherworldly structures of the siphonophores.
As this is the largest and least environment on earth and home to as many as one million undescribed species, our intention was to present the oceanic column as a space between known and unknown, and to offer a window into another world that in may appear to be grounded in unreality, despite being located on our own planet. The goal was to pique human curiosity in this environment, while drawing together historic and contemporary scientific observations, local mythologies, legends, histories and beliefs surrounding this region, artifacts would range from scientific to fantastic, organic to manmade, physical to digital.