Deep Star

“Deep Star” 5-channel installation with audio. Live Chesapeake Bay Data. Peale Museum, Baltimore MD. December 2023-April 2024. Electronic music by Dan Deacon.

“Deep Star” is a multi-channel video and audio installation in live conversation with the Chesapeake Bay. In this work-in-progress, the public is a complicit witness to Bay water, its patterns, flows, blooms, and their significant influence on marine wildlife. The Fells Point docks are teeming with scores of bioluminescent ctenophore jellyfish that have co-developed in form and movement, passively revealing the water currents. “Deep Star” creates unique videos, animations, and sounds from critters, both invisible [microbes] and visible.

To deepen the connection of marine forms interweaving with the complexity of water patterns, the project streams in live data from sensors already in the Bay to the project. Working with the MD DNR and a software engineer, where we transfer the live pH, oxygen, temperature, saline [salt], chlorophyll [microbes], and turbidity [clarity] data from sensors already in the Bay to the project.

For example, working specifically with data from the Inner Harbor, the high oxygen levels will display a large deepstaria jellyfish. But when the oxygen is low, the jellyfish becomes small, or if it’s really low or anoxic, the animation transforms into a plastic bag. In this way, many aspects of the video, 3D animation, and sound are affected by temperature, salt conditions, the number of critters, etc., making “Deep Star” an undulating multi-channel story that changes over time and seasons.

For “Deep Star”, the idea of “emergence” and “emergent strategies” considers strategies in nature [including physics] that describe water phenomena that drive new emerging forms. Octavia Butler inspired these ideas via Adrian Maree Brown, who coined the term “emergent strategy.” For Brown, emergent strategies are “a framework for resistance that is rooted in the miracles of nature, decentralized, collective leadership, and personal, relational, organizational, and movement-wide transformation.” Our strategic focus was based in part on Brown’s idea that anomalous strategies in nature can be a model for the benefit of human communities, from species longevity to social change.

Two philosophers place the environment as the significant influencer from which human-made matter emerges. Jane Bennet details the vibrancy of inert matter that emerges symbiotically from its environment. She calls this “thing power.” And in her argument towards the posthuman, Katherine Hayles describes that scientists have proved the existence of matter that’s imperceivable to humans but influential to human consciousness. She describes this limitation of understanding through the “umwelt”, a species-specific worldview that is locked in by limited biological capacities. What humans intellectualize and the stuff we make are both extraordinary but also limited by the mechanics of our fixed biology. And, If we follow their lead that our environment influences our consciousness, the more stuff (matter) we make, the more our consciousness slips into a virtual existence that Hayles calls the post-human. Therefore, species with a distinct or only overlapping “umwelt” may offer humans a glimpse into an objective worldview typically not available to us. The connections between environmental emergence, organic differentiation, and the umwelt became the basis of this art, philosophy, and science project. These ideas are further detailed in the essay for the International Symposium on Electronic Art [ISEA] 2024 Brisbane linked above.