"I would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us"

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(John Cage in a letter to Merce Cunningham, 1944)

Oceanic ecologies inherit sites and cycles for sensing practices in the making. These fluid bodies teem with microscopic organisms that collectively provide ecosystem services rarely seen as such, while humans develop techno-scientific tools to analyze and transform these complex ecologies. Among these microorganisms, phytoplankton (greek φυτόν [phytó] 'plant';  πλαγκτός [planktos] 'drifter, wanderer') drift through ocean currents. They are foundational to planetary life and largely imperceptible to it, at once ecologically indispensable and structurally inaccessible to direct human address. 

 

If artistic experimental apparatuses can make the significance of these organisms and their relation to human life, perceptible, can they reach beyond scientific epistemologies, and in doing so, help cultivate ecological sensitivity attentive to structural asymmetries that persist even once this significance is understood? 

 

Moving through various field sites, laboratories and aquaria as interlocking modes of inquiry, processes are attuned to and cycles are wit(h)nessed. In the field, diving and immersion stage encounter as proximity without merging, breath as the body’s first instrument. In the laboratory, cultivation and containment expose what scientific method already knows implicitly and what it forecloses. The aquarium extends this into display, curating access while making legible whose attention the encounter presupposes. The insights become concentrated in apparatuses I build, which materialize an impossible fantasy of direct metabolic coupling with plankton, breath measured against their photosynthesis, not to resolve it but to make its impossibility legible. The apparatuses produce a threshold that is not correspondence, but a form of coexistence requiring no address, one within plankton react. Written argument, apparatus, installative practice, as well as moving and still image run as parallel registers throughout. The installations stage the argument for a body to briefly inhabit.  

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Extended finally to the scale of a research vessel crossing open water, the same structural asymmetry that shapes a laboratory chamber, repeats at the scale of planetary infrastructure. Zooming out, transcribing the experiences, the dissertation does not close the distance to plankton. It stays with it and does not offer ecological sensitivity as comfort, but as question what it might look like once correspondence is given up as the goal.