The audience enters a pitch black room with thousands of invisible organisms floating above their heads in a skylight aquarium. They’re invited to speak, and if they do their voice drops to a chant-like rumbling sound that excites the bioluminescent dinoflagellates into illuminating. Their blue glow mimics the shape of the sound waves in the water. Therefore, if you ask “what’s the shape of water?”, the dinoflagellates will tell you.
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“What is the Shape of Water?” [ photography series ], Twelve 16x16”low-light photographic stills from tank with bio-matter, 2020.
“What is the Shape of Water?” Photography Series, by Lisa Moren. 16x16” each panel, 2019. Images are made from bubble wrap, hand-made combs with toothpicks [typically used for producing marbeliezed paper], found objects such as a home depot garden fence panel, Foster Reynolds-Santiago hand [graduate assistant] and one of the circles are the bioluminescent critters swimming in a speaker mimicking a voice coming through.
My one-year old daughter wrote the word “alive” on an etch-a-sketch. She drew fervently all the time. I traced the outline of her scribble in wire and dunked it the bioluminescent bath while snapping photographs from underneath the plexiglass tank. Each photograph took dozens of attempts each to capture the 16x16” images above. My daughter never stopped drawing fervently and her scribbling has evolved into awarding her a placement at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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The DNA sequence [acgt] responsible for bioluminescence was transposed into a chanting audio composition via a text to music open source algorithm. The project called “The Well-Tempered Dinoflagellate: Luciferous DNA”, played during “What is the Shape of Water?” when no microphone was turned on. Therefore, the dinoflagellates will bioluminescence in accordance to their own DNA.
At the IMET Open House on May 4th, we displayed “What is the Shape of Water?” in progress along with a dinoflagellate detector version of “Chesapeake Bay Water Watercolors.” This combined watercolor pigments made out of Bay water with augmented reality.
When the user detects the paintings with these organisms typically invisible to humans they appear large in an underwater animation.
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NEXT \ \ \ Under the Bay
Making the invisibilities of the Bay visible in AR
