The ocean within

Without a body, there is no cognition: we humans can only represent and understand what interacts with our five senses. Thanks to mirror neurons, the movements of other animal beings “resonate” within us, allowing us to simulate and feel them in our own bodies. If more than 74% of global marine waters that are still unmapped and underexplored¹, how can we make these ecosystems resonate within us?

«Out of sight, out of mind: most people don’t think about the microscopic organisms of the ocean, including phytoplankton and zooplankton, which are the basis of the food web and regulation of the atmosphere on which our lives depend» says Nan Renner, PhD in Cognitive Science, who is Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography,  University of California, San Diego along the Pacific Ocean coast. Founded in 1903, it is one of the world’s leading scientific research centres on oceans and the atmosphere.

Lisa Cartwright specializes in visual culture studies and feminist studies of science and technology. She is Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Practice Concentration in the PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism at UC San Diego. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale. Her books include “Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture” (1995) and “Practices of Looking” (2001). She is one of the founders of the International Association of Visual Culture and the journal “Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience”. Together with Nan Renner of the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, she is leading a multi-year research and curatorial project on oceanography for the Getty Foundation’s Art + Science initiative Pacific Standard Time 2024.

Visit the official website of Embodied Pacific

«The Scripps were philanthropists in both arts and sciences, which over the decades led to the creation of a transdisciplinary community» explains Lisa Cartwright. «In the 1960s, when the University of California San Diego was founded, Scripps became part of it». Cartwright teaches in the Visual Arts Department at the university and focuses on feminist studies in science and technology. At  Scripps Oceanography, they study images returned by high-tech probes exploring the ocean, while her department connects these images with the history and cultures of the area. «The city of San Diego is ten minutes from the Mexican border,» she says. «This land has been inhabited for millennia by the Kumeyaay, who built canoes from tule reeds, cooked, fished, and lived on the cliffs above the ocean. With colonisation across the Americas, coastal peoples were removed from their ancestral lands and pushed inland».

Before the pandemic, Cartwright engaged Renner for a project to forward connections between art, science, and cultures of the Pacific Ocean: first came Navigating the Pacific: Oceanography Art and Science (2019-2022) and now Embodied Pacific, which involves 30 artists for a series of exhibitions and events at six different locations across the city from September 2024 to March 2025 as part of the Getty Foundation’s five-year “PST ART” initiative. «Sometimes people study the interaction between living beings at both micro and macro levels in a detached way» Cartwright explains. «The approach we want to follow instead starts from the emotional experience that people live together, creating connections that can truly form a community». Connections that are channelled through bodies.

Vibrations between art and science

The Scripps Ocean Atmosphere Research Simulator (SOARS) has been operational since 2022. Equipped with a wave pool and a 36-metre wind tunnel, it can simulate the conditions of ocean surface waters from the tropics to the poles. It is used to study ocean-atmosphere interactions, climate change, and the impacts on human health from aerosols and sea sprays. Its data have been used by artists Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter for the work Embodied Simulation²: The Air-Sea Interface, which will be exhibited at Birch Aquarium from next October.

‘Embodied Simulation’ by Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter. Tribeca 2024 excerpt (1 min) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Nan Renner is Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Birch Aquarium within the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California and a Design Research Partner at UC San Diego’s CREATE research centre focused on educational equity. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of California San Diego focusing on the embodied/multimodal/cognitive consequences of design. For Renner, learning is an engine of change: she has been applying this vision for decades in the cultural organisations (museums, aquariums, universities, incubators) she works with, in intergenerational and transdisciplinary spaces.

Go to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography website

The multi-screen audiovisual installation consists of digital videos created with the support of Artificial Intelligence algorithms: footage of people dancing has been combined with images of natural elements such as plankton, waves, and corals. Human bodies blend into the movement of these other natural forms, making it easier for viewers to identify with the oceanic ecosystem. Hence, the term Embodied Pacific.

«We have tried to create connections that challenge what we think we know about the ocean, how we perceive it, and reveal what we have not yet seen and perhaps not even thought about», Renner emphasises.

SOARS is not the only ocean exploration tool at Scripps: the Zooglider is a two-metre-long orange underwater robot active since 2019. It operates at depths of up to 400 metres and is used to observe zooplankton, which are animal microorganisms low on of the food chain that are carried along by ocean currents. These microorganisms, which are often transparent, fragile, and/or gelatinous, are useful in understanding climate change. The  sensors on this autonomous vehicle detect them both through a specialised optical system that records their shadows as they pass through a sampling tunnel and through a dual-frequency acoustic system.

Artist Claudine Arendt used these sounds and shadows for her installation Sound and Shadow, in which she reproduced the shapes of zooplankton in 3D and incorporated them into glazed porcelain ceramics. «I see such a rich intersection in the way we perceive the world around us, where we use artistic and scientific practices, including technology and sensors, to enhance our senses, to really extend what our body is able to perceive and understand», Renner highlights. «And in this transdisciplinary integration, we truly expand our perspectives and perceptions. It is not just about conceptual understanding: it is about joy and love for this planet and for each other, and what the co-creation of knowledge does for the human spirit».

Navigating the future

Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Diego are located in La Jolla, a renowned coastal town that the native Kumeyaay called “Matkoolahooee”, meaning “place of caves”, after the seven sea caves that can still be explored by kayak today. «Many people who visit or live in San Diego County and border region with Mexico, do not know the Indigenous history of this place», Renner points out.

We want to showcase the oceanic cultural practices of our Indigenous partners who clearly state: “We are still here” and claim their place on the coast.

Kumeyaay ocean culture is currently in a state of revival, with the leadership of Stan Rodriguez, EdD, a recognised international leader in Indigenous language and culture revitalisation. The collaboration  with Rodriguez breathed new life into the Embodied Pacific project.

«Transdisciplinarity means going through failures that turn into new ideas and always generate something joyful: I am a great admirer of Jack Halberstam and his approach to queer failure³ and the joy that comes from mistakes and the serendipity of practice», Cartwright smiles. «Initially, our project was conceived mainly as archival in relation to the university’s environmental research programme, but with the pandemic, the archive was closed. Meeting Stan meant connecting with the deep Indigenous oceanic culture. All scientific and social scholars began building and designing these canoes with him all summer. This is just one example of how a process that seemed to have started on the wrong foot has transformed into a joyful expansion of what we think science is».

Kumeyaay boats, ha kwaiyo, are built from tule, a freshwater reed that grows up to three to four metres tall: the reeds are harvested, dried, bundled, and woven into canoes that are launched during community events. Community members participated in all aspects of the process, culminating in multiple boat launches at Kendall-Frosh Marsh Reserve, La Jolla Shores, and Silver Strand, with as many as fifty boats at one event. Community events sometimes take place during a “grunion run,” when people collect fish after they have spawned on the beach and share precious stories from the culture of those who lived on this coast before colonisation.

«We will have some of these boats on display,» Renner explains. «We will have a multimedia video by Indigenous filmmaker Andrew Pittman that traces their history, and we will organise some public events to invite the wider community, both Native and non-native, to participate in some construction workshops and, when weather and ocean conditions allow, the launch of the new boats we’ve built». Outdoors, with a view of the ocean, a canoe will be positioned as a platform for imagination, storytelling, and sharing Indigenous culture, along with a historical map of the Kumeyaay coastal communities, based on the research of scholar Michael Connolly Miskwish. «There has been a history of denial, even in the academic community, of the Kumeyaay as a coastal and oceanic people», Renner explains. By framing the ocean with an iPhone through the free app “Our Worlds”, you will find yourself surrounded by a fleet of boats driven by Kumeyaay in Augmented Reality.

Embodied tradition

Catherine Eng is an award-winning designer, developer and filmmaker. Her apps have been listed in Apple’s Top 10 with over three million cumulative downloads. She is CTO and co-founder of Our Worlds and holds a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. She won the Ricoh Theta Prize with three teammates at MIT’s Reality Virtually Hackathon in October 2017, for a virtual reality project supporting first aid. In 2015, she founded Design Code Build, a coding academy for schools. She believes that the most lasting lessons on digital media come from projects adapted to the specific cultures and interests of each community of learners.

Kilma S. Lattin and Catherine Eng, co-founders of the OurWorld app, also attended the launch ceremony of the new Kumeyaay canoes. «Both my partner and I are part of the community. What is it like to have ten canoes around you, get on them, and find yourself in the middle of the ocean? These are the experiences we want to be able to bring back to life with technology,» explains Eng. «We attend events in our community and, as much as we can, we record for posterity the charisma and wisdom of our stories, to share the history of our resilience and our current and future culture».

Eng and Lattin’s 360-degree cameras captured all the canoe-building meetings and the creation of ancient baskets with Indigenous iconography. These were combined with green screen footage, resulting in volumetric, 3D video that can be incorporated into applications or graphic platforms for the development of custom immersive content, which will be uploaded at exhibitions from September onwards. «In Kumeyaay language, the word maay-haa, “creator”, is composed of the words meaning “sky” and “water”: this gives rise to the idea that everything comes from water and sky», Eng explains. «The idea that culture and language derive from the landscape, from the land, is the core of what we do. We are starting to work with community filmmakers to help them produce low-cost immersive reality content. Anyone with a story to tell should not have to incur great expenses: we don’t want to create a film studio that people have to come to, but we want to bring the studio to the people and replicate it wherever we go». The following video, representing the canoe builders’ movement for the OurWorlds⁴ project, is a clear example of this.

In the application, launched in November 2022, content is uploaded in the form of augmented reality objects and extended reality holograms: clickable or panoramic “overlay” text and videos, which one can immerse themselves in even by hearing through headphones where the sound is spatialised. «Augmented reality objects are georeferenced, that is, positioned in physical space through GPS», Eng explains. «If we take a canoe as an example, it is possible to digitally see the detailed texture of the material with which it was made».

In addition to the documentary video format, the content can be elaborated with shaders and special effects to evoke the idea of timelessness: «We don’t know what people of the past looked like, but we know there was energy, intention, and a sense of urgency in performing certain movements», Eng emphasises. «This type of visualisation conveys them effectively and allows us to bring these practices from the past to the future».

«It is a project», Catwright concludes, «that emphasises the alternative aesthetics that can grow in opposition to the realism of the digital twin». Digital twins, that is, the three-dimensional reproductions of physical objects and structures for prototyping or maintenance purposes, often simply describe what is, rather than stimulating what could be. But the imagination of the future springs from what we understand because we feel, immersing ourselves in reality with all five senses engaged. Bringing to light forgotten stories, people, and organisms from the Pacific Ocean can help us feel, and therefore understand, how much its waves resonate within us.

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1. For more on this topic, see Souri, P. (2024, June 21). Seabed 2030 announces latest progress on World Hydrography Day — Seabed 2030, Seabed 2030. https://seabed2030.org/2024/06/21/seabed-2030-announces-latest-progress-on-world-hydrography-day/ ↩︎
2. To learn more about the concept of “Embodied simulation”, see Gallese V. (2005), Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, (4), pp. 23–48 ↩︎
3. To learn about the work, see Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sn283 ↩︎
4. The project’s official website: https://ourworlds.io/about/ ↩︎