Arts – The Ocean Memory Project

Blue Dreams – Exhibition

Gino Caballero — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

Blue Dreams

Arts, Granted Projects, Ocean, Publications, Sound
March 14, 2023

Blue Dreams – Exhibition

Blue Dreams is an immersive video installation which integrates abstract imagery, deep sea video footage, and computer modeling to portray the resilience of our planet’s smallest yet most vital living systems. Microbial networks thrive in these extreme environments and are essential to the functioning of our planet: they produce the air we breathe, regulate ocean chemistry, and are the origins of life on Earth. This immersive piece is meant to inspire awe and wonder at these systems, processes and landscapes otherwise hidden from view, that connect us to our past and which we rely on for our own survival.

Blue Dreams was created by multidisciplinary artist Rebecca Rutstein in collaboration with scientists Rika Anderson, Samantha Joye, Shayn Peirce-Cottler and Tom Skalak, through a grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) Ocean Memory Project. The project evolved through a year-long collaboration between its five contributors. Anderson, an environmental microbiologist at Carleton College, advised on marine microbial adaptation and resilience, microbial gene sharing networks, and the implications for exoplanet science and astrobiology. Joye, a marine biogeochemist at University of Georgia and explorer of diverse deep-sea environments, provided insight into the biogeochemistry of vent and seep systems, and the interplay of microbial networks with large-scale ecological processes. Skalak, a bioengineer, provided conceptual vision and insight into methods for abstracting the data into system models, including agent-based simulations that could provoke visualization of swarm and collective behaviors. Peirce-Cottler, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, created agent-based models of deep-sea microbial growth patterns generated from color patterns of original Rutstein paintings on the same subject. And multi-disciplinary artist Rutstein researched, synthesized, abstracted, and layered imagery, animation, video, and sound to create Blue Dreams.

This exhibition is organized by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences.
Generous support was provided by Schmidt Ocean Institute
Additional support provided by Nancy Rabalais, Jody Deming, and Richard Lenski.

Team Leader:

Mandy Joe

Team Members:

Rebecca Rutstein

Multidisciplinary artist

Margot Knight

Rika Anderson

Assistant professor at Carleton College in the Biology department

Tom Skalak

Ocean Being[s]

Daniel Kohn — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

Ocean Being[s]

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

Anya Yermakova

Composer, Sound Artist, Scholar and Performer

Daniel Kohn

Visual Artist

Out of the Darkness

Daniel Kohn — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

Out of the Darkness

Out of the Darkness, a year-long exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, was part of Rutstein’s tenure as the 2018-19 Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding at the University of Georgia, an annual award given to leading global scholars and creative thinkers who conceive and produce ground breaking collaborative works with University of Georgia faculty. Rutstein’s collaboration with Regents Professor and microbiologist Mandy Joye included a joint expedition at sea to the Guaymas Basin in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, and a deep sea dive in the submersible Alvin to the ocean floor 2,200 meters below, funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to two weeks of community engagement, Rutstein and Joye gave a joint plenary lecture at the 2018 A2RU conference on Art, Sustainability and the Environment to an audience of 50 research universities.

Joye and Rutstein’s collaborative work stems from the Ocean Memory Project where they met. Guaymas Basin serves as a lens to look through time, where ancient hydrothermal processes can be seen anew in a nascent spreading sea, embodying a form of ocean memory. Included in this exhibition is, Shimmer, a 64′ long modular steel sculptural installation with LED lights and motion sensors that creates trails of light in reaction to the movements of the viewer. The installation is comprised of undulating, hexagonal sculptural forms (inspired by hydrocarbon structures that form through chemical processes unique to this location), and programmable LED lights, which mimic bioluminescent patterns observed during their dive in the Sea of Cortez. Also on view is Progenitor, a 22′ tall painting installation inspired by sonar mapping data, unique hydrothermal vent processes and photo microscopy of bacteria from Guaymas Basin.

Mandy Joye is an oceanographer, an educator, and an ocean explorer. She is a Regents’ Professor and holds the Athletic Association Distinguished Professorship in Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. She is an expert in microbial ecology and biogeochemistry and her work explores on hydrocarbon, trace gas, and nutrient dynamics in the context of environmental dynamics and climate change. She works in both blue water and near shore ocean environments. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, bridging the fields of analytical chemistry, microbiology, and geology. She is also deeply committed to science advocacy and science communication and collaborates with artists and writers to share ocean stories and facilitate ocean stewardship.

Rebecca Rutstein

Multidisciplinary Artist

Mandy Joye

Biogeochemist

Unlocking Ocean Memory from Marine Vertebrate Fossil Time Capsules

Gino Caballero — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

Unlocking Ocean Memory from Marine Vertebrate Fossil Time Capsules

What if ocean memory from long extinct organisms were still accessible by the traces they left behind? What if we can access ancient ocean memory by experiencing it through the senses of marine animals who no longer swim the seas? What did these individual marine animals sense over their lifetime?

This project seeks to analyze and utilize fossilized sense organs to unlock long hidden ocean memories and expand our human concepts of senses and sensing beyond the terrestrial anthropocene. The approach combines research methods from geology, biology, and paleontology, with artistic practices from painting and music, with technological approaches from data logging and modeling, all merged with science communication.

Team Leader:

Yinan Wang

Team Members:

Michelle Banks

Insley Haciski

Heather Spence

Marine and Science Advisor, Water Power Technologies Office, U.S. Department of Energy

Sensing the Abyss: Immersive Scores for Interdisciplinary Improvisation

Gino Caballero — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

Sensing the Abyss: Immersive Scores for Interdisciplinary Improvisation

This project is a multi-stage experimentation with ocean memory, featuring an interdisciplinary residency and performance as the primary creative research space and point of departure. Rajna Swaminathan’s Mangal ensemble gathers improvising musicians alongside visual and movement artists to experiment with the concept of a “score”– whether it resides on the page, in the body and senses, or in an underlying relationship to the environment. Oceanic modes of understanding sound and movement are deeply relevant to this inquiry, leading us to ask: how can the score move beyond inscription-based intelligibility and embody the opacities of immersion, absorption, and dissipation? The preliminary residency and performance offer an opportunity to share materials, find sense-bending prompts, and improvise together.

Building from this momentum, offshoot “scores” and research questions are invited to take shape, led by the team members in conversation with a broader community network (local, institutional, and beyond). Sensing the Abyss unfolds through (1) the documentation of a one-week residency/performance by Mangal at Seattle’s Chapel Performance Space, followed by (2) a visit to UC Santa Barbara, where collaborators will meet and discuss further experimental possibilities, culminating in (3) a virtual meeting and open feedback session to compile ideas for independent and collaborative research/creation. Through the multiple phases of this project, we hope to offer a fruitful sounding board for future-oriented projects that combine artistic, humanistic, and scientific modes of inquiry to transform how we sense and relate to ocean memory and the climate crisis.

Team Leader:

Rajna Swaminathann

Team Members:

Anya Yermakova

Composer, sound artist, scholar and performer

Jody Deming

Melody Jue

Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara

To become an ocean

Gino Caballero — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

To Become an Ocean

To become an ocean

To Become the Ocean is an ambitious project on ideas relating to critical sustainability across platforms for significant opportunities with a team of collaborators of exceptional proficiency in their respective fields. It presents a potentially career-defining chance for my practice to communicate the importance of sensing the ocean as a source of novel scientific exploration internationally, as well as exploring the concept of how art can be used as a force for social change.

Author:

Siobhan McDonald

Visual Artist

OIOM: Non-anthropocentric Storytelling

Gino Caballero — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 15:00:47 +0000

OIOM: Non-anthropocentric Storytelling

Memories are made up of information fragments– residue collected through experience. These fragments gain meaning through context, strung together to build stories. Storytelling is a method of preserving and shaping collective memory. Who/ what are the ocean storytellers? How can humans share these ocean memories?

OIOC:C/H 1 is an exploratory first chapter. The storyteller is the cephalopod. A non-anthropocentric methodology helps us to greet the storyteller’s experience, on their terms. By taking actions to reposition ourselves more like cephalopods, we shift our perspective. Drawing from cognitive science on theories of embodied and extended cognition, we posit that the act of trying to experience the world as a cephalopod creates a cross-species empathy that may reveal pathways to understand their worldview, stories, memories.

exploratory actions include: transcoding experiments, movement analysis, cognitive research. Transcoding experiments allow us to use our senses in alternative ways, to shift our worldview to better align with the cephalopod’s. Movement analysis leads to a cephalopod lexicon– translating movement into language and/or meaning. Cognitive science provides the theoretical foundation to help translate perspectives on behaviors to possible motivations. All actions aim to increase cross-species empathy.

Author:

Dana Hemes

Interdisciplinary artist

The Ocean Carries ‘Memories’ of SARS-COV-2

Gino Caballero — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 12:00:12 +0000

The Ocean Carries ‘Memories’ of SARS-COV-2

A weekly meeting to discuss the connections between the pandemic and ocean memory leads to a collaboratively authored piece exploring what ocean memory can tell us about SARS CoV-2, published August 15, 2020, in Scientific American

Journeys Through Water – Exhibition

Gino Caballero — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 12:00:30 +0000

Journeys Through Water – Exhibition

Nov 17, 2021, to June 21, 2022

Onboard the RV Rachel Carson, members of the Ocean Memory Project engaged in research at the interface of art and science to begin to understand how the effects of environmental changes are recorded and expressed in ocean memories. The four artists on the cruise – Monique Verdin, Rebecca Rutstein, Anya Yermakova, and Daniel Kohn – presented their work inspired by a multi-disciplinary research cruise to explore forms of Ocean Memory in the Salish Sea at the University of Washington.

Rebecca Rutstein and Monique Verdin

Anya Yermakova and Daniel Kohn