Research Background
Art-science collaborations are rapidly emerging globally as a way to transform complex data into accessible experiences that can shift public thinking (Leimbach and Armstrong, 2018). The 2024 Wild Media Exhibition features a curated selection of international artists whose work engages with more-than-human life and living systems, inclusive of flora, fauna, fungi, biomes, cells, or their lab-grown or artificial alternatives. The exhibition explores what it means to engage in art processes inspired by non-human or living systems and asks whether new technologies are changing the ways in which we interact with such systems in uncertain times.
Research Contribution
As a major installation for the exhibition, ‘Migration Patterns: Listening Underwater’ is an immersive sonic environment that explores non-human perspectives on listening in the deep ocean, where species are reliant on sound to communicate and survive. Drawing on a large database of Barclay’s hydrophone recordings from the Queensland coastline, this work traces sonic migration patterns and shifting ecologies from the smallest micro-crustaceans to the largest marine mammals on the planet. This installation transposes infrasonic and ultrasonic recordings into perceptible ranges for humans through two hours of composed soundscapes immersing listeners underwater.
Research Significance
‘Migration Patterns: Listening Underwater’ was commissioned and curated as one of 18 international projects to feature in the Wild Media Exhibition at Winona State University in Minnesota in June 2024. The exhibition was a major curated program for the annual International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) conference, the largest gathering for digital media research internationally, with funding support from the WSU Foundation and the Centre for Digital Narrative in the USA.