Anya Yermakova, Daniel Kohn
April 29, 2023
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This triptych, ocean being[s], is an Ocean Memory reflection co-created by Anya Yermakova and Daniel Kohn, stemming from their experience in the Salish Sea in fall 2019, and weaving through those seeds’ development within the Ocean Memory Project through 2020 and 2021.
Substrate began with a watercolor video seeking to evoke the movement of water and life through the ocean subfloor and plays with the connection between the Colwellia bacteria Jody Deming studies in the Arctic and the family of bacteria responsible for dispersing hydrocarbons in the Gulf discussed by Ocean Memory member Mandy Joye.
Proto-rhythms uses footage filmed during a cruise of the EV Nautilus off the Oregon coast during an artist residency with Ocean Exploration Trust – the congruence of water, human-made events, and animal realm – in relation to emerging rhythms of the ocean. The sound punctuates the rhythmicity of the waves, following the rise and fall of the web of birds. The soundscape juggles the sensorial space between the distant, reverberating sounds and the close, somatically-tuned noises.
Voices is an experimental reworking of our human experience on the Ocean Memory Project research voyage on the RV Rachel Carson in the Salish Sea in October 2019. Including indigenous and Western scientific voices aboard the Rachel Carson, and exploring the murky boundary between what constitutes “signal” and what constitutes “noise,” this piece is an attempt to relate the various human and more than human voices, to paint a possible sonic world in which they are not in contradiction.
Daniel Kohn is a franco-american artist whose work stands at the crossroads of art and science. Long immersed in questions of place and representation, his engagement with science began in 2003 when he was invited to the Broad Institute where he became Founding Artist in Residence and co-founded the Visualization Group. Kohn was subsequently in residence at the Center for Epigenomics and Art/Science Research Director at the Ligo Project. Following a NAKFI conference on the Mesopelagic Daniel refocused his work on the Ocean and now co-leads the Ocean Memory Project, an NAS funded transdisciplinary collaboration based on the question: Does the ocean have memory?
Anya Yermakova is a multi-disciplinary artist and a scholar, who integrates sound, dance and history and philosophy of logic. She works with proto-rhythms as a tool for understanding non-hegemonic forms of logicality, in history and today. Her creative practice engages musical composition, field recordings, archival traces, and movement research. Since joining the Ocean Memory Project in 2019, Anya has been extending her thinking about the history of non-binary, non-classical, non-Western logics to oceanic logics and embodied logicking. She has held artist residencies at Djerassi (CA), UCross (WY), Snape Malting (UK), as well as an Artist-Scholar
