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Acoustic Ocean

Ursula Biemann

2018 00:18:50 NorwayEnglishColorStereo16:94K video
Tags:
Environment, Indigenous, Nature, Sound, Technology

Description

Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, Acoustic Ocean sets out to explore the sonic ecology of marine life. The scientist as an explorer and important mediator of the contemporary understanding of our planetary ecosystems is a central figure in this video. She makes her appearance in the person of a Sami (indigenous of northern Scandinavia) biologist-diver who is using all sorts of hydrophones, parabolic mics and recording devices. Her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and other biological forms of expression. Sonic manifestations are vital modes of communication, navigation and survival for a great majority of deep-sea beings. Given the poor visibility in the deep sea, the sonic dimension is the primary means of communication, navigation, and survival in this penumbral liquid universe. 

Acoustic Ocean is a science fictional quest into an amphibian life world that is constituted by an assemblage of human, marine, machinic, organic, climatic, and digital elements, which are all utterly interdependent. A techno-organic bond links this aquanaut with her body, and with the sensorial instruments and the sonic environment of the vast multiplicity of sea creatures she is exploring. In this scientific array, any form of critical distance between the scientist, her research subject, and the instruments, is absent. They have all grown together. The hydrophones laid out like tentacles over the dark rocks, taking on characteristics of deep-sea creatures. This feminist posthuman figuration suggests a porosity, permeability, and connectivity of the human body with regards to water and the many life forms it sustains and ingests.

— Astrida Neimanis, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

The artistic gesture of this artwork is that of rewriting a script for inter-species relations and of a mind-body intra-active form of knowledge creation. It addresses the science of a marine landscape by showing the scientific interest in the images and sounds of an altered sense. Acoustic Ocean draws on a range of recent scientific insights in its foray into modes of marine biological expressions, proposing an immersed image for the complex and fragile interactions and responses between humans and nonhuman, knowledge, and instruments in these multimedia landscapes.

Crew : Set designer Michael Graessner (Berlin) has designed the props for the marine scientist. Sofia Jannok, singer, musician and climate activist from the Sami Northern Scandinavian indigenous community is the performer. Lydia Zimmermann operates the camera (Barcelona/Zurich). Patrick Codenys (Brussels) is the sound designer.

The project has been supported by a generous grant from Pro Helvetia Swiss Council for the Arts.

Acoustic Ocean has been commissioned by the Atlantic Project After the Future — in the wake of utopian imaginaries, Plymouth,UK, curated by Tom Trevor.

About Ursula Biemann

Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist. Her videos address the interdisciplinary-discursive ecotone of geology and climatology merged with human politics and history. Engaging in the political ecology of oil, forest, ice and water, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry, creative imaging and scientific findings to explore a changing planetary reality.

Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations, which has recently taken her to the Amazon, the Upper Nile and the Arctic region. She works the findings into multi-layered videos by connecting the micro-perspectives on the ground with a theoretical macro level, proposing a reflexive exploration of planetary and videographic organization.

Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including speculative video, ethnographic practice, interview, text, cartography, probes and scientific materials. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects. She is a member of the World of Matter collective multi-media project on resource ecologies.

Her earlier writing and experimental video work focused on migration, mobility, technology and gender. She also made space and mobility her prime category in the curatorial and book projects Geography and the Politics of Mobility, The Maghreb Connection, and the widely exhibited art and research project Sahara Chronicle on clandestine migration networks.

With the video essay Black Sea Files (2005) she shifted the primary focus to natural resources and their situated materiality, further developed in Egyptian Chemistry (2012) and Forest Law (2014). With Deep Weather (2013) and Subatlantic (2015) she opens a post-documentary space to explore the larger temporalities of climate change.

The artist had solo exhibitions at the Broad Art Museum at MSU, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k., BAK Utrecht, Bildmuseet Umea in Sweden, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Copenhagen, Helmhaus Zurich, Lentos Museum Linz, and at film festivals FID Marseille and TEK Rome. Her work also contributed to major exhibitions at the Arnolfini Bristol; Tapies Foundation Barcelona; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Nottingham Contemporary; KIASMA Helsinki; San Francisco Art Institute; Jeu de Paume Paris; Kunstverein Hamburg; and many others, as well as the Art Biennials in Gwangju, Shanghai, Liverpool, Sao Paulo, Bamako, Istanbul, Montreal, Thessaloniki, and Sevilla.

Ursula Biemann received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts (1986) in New York and pursued post-graduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) in New York where she lived most of the 1980s. She was appointed Doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea (2008), and received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland, and the Prix Thun for Art and Ethics 2018.

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