Making, Losing, and Recovering Forgotten Memories at Oceanic Interfaces: Performance-Ritual in coastal Portugal

(Portuguese below; link to film here)

This project is a performance-ritual on the Portuguese coast that aims to provide illustrative and embodied material about the role of oceanic interfaces as sites for recovering memories that have been forgotten or lost. The investigation asks: 

Can memories be preserved across species?

• How can a human body be situated such that it is invited to remember amphibianness, or remember extinct creatures that inhabited the intertidal zones, or other distantly related forms of life? 

Can memories be preserved, in the body, across generations, even in the case of a nonexistent archival record? 

• Can bodies find ways of experiencing the intertidal zone that remind them of something they didn’t know they had forgotten? How can objects on the sites, fishs skins, seaweed, participate in this?

What does a human body need to “shed” in order to access ancient memories that span temporal scales far beyond a human lifetime, to feel “at home” in a perpetual state of flux? 

• Whether in a slow walk, a crawl, a stand, or something else, what needs to be forgotten/remembered in order to haptically understand the intertidal zone as gradual shifts on a scale of tens of thousands of years?

Invisible Kelp Forest: From Smell to Sound is an 8-channel sonic composition that explores the possibility that sound is an ideal medium for translating senses of smell, or chemosensation underwater.It invites the listener to smell the kelp forest with their ears, a mode of synaesthesia.

We explore the ways that sound and smell can both convey intensity, distance, dispersion, texture, and elements of memory that may be specific to particular organisms. We imagine that the olfactory memory of the kelp forest is multiple, linked to what is meaningful for different marine fauna.

We plan to choose 3-6 different marine organisms, and create sonic impressions of their chemosensory experiences of the kelp forest in a scientifically-informed manner. Invisible Kelp Forest plays with invisibility in several ways: by denying the listener any visual cues, they must use their imagination to conjure a spatial sense of the kelp forest on their own.

We invite listeners to pay attention to the way that listening for smell feels in the body, perhaps deterritorializing the sensorium. Our project to translate the underwater smellscape of a kelp forest is a way of evoking a particular kind of archival memory, one that is usually not “for” human beings, who cannot smell while underwater.

Given the fact that the historical range of kelp forests around the world is shrinking (bull kelp forests on the west coast, giant kelp forests in Tasmania), Invisible Kelp Forest gestures to these absences while modeling a unique form of sensory speculation and transductive mediation.

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.