Twilight Zone (2019-2021)
A collaborative artwork with Shona Kitchen

Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Artist-at-Sea Program is an expeditionary residency that pairs artists with ocean scientists and engineers aboard the oceanographic research vessel Falkor. The work utilizes footage collected on the ROV SuBastian using URI and Harvard’s RAD Sampler and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s Deep PIV in combination with artistic fieldwork in the ocean. Artwork created for this residency is part of an ongoing traveling exhibition with Schmidt Ocean Institute. We reflected on notions of home, community, survival, adaptation, and protection.We considered the Falkor itself a species, and explored the similarities between the Falkor, SuBastian, and the organisms that inhabit the oceanic midwater, the Twilight Zone. Sophisticated communication technologies on board the Falkor to those of bioluminescence and the variety of sensors (lidar, etc) mirroring natural sensing systems such as tentacles. We compared cycles that take place on the ship, such as ballast water and food recycling, to carbon cycling or other processes used by siphonophores to propel and orient themselves in the water column.