When exploring the distinct yet interconnected narratives circling oceanic systems, it is crucial to use our complex embodied technologies to focus on what is unseen, on sounds that are bouncing off our tools and on how this helps us imagine the unimaginable structures and environments long gone or yet to come.
Plankton, the marine drifters carried by tides and currents, will be our guide in this exploration. Can the tools we use as our body’s extensions for examining the ocean allow us to know them? What does knowing them even mean? Knowing their DNA, their habits, their relationality with other bodies? Reflecting on their lives, interactions, networks and complexities, three storylines begin to unfold and ultimately come together in a meeting of perspectives.
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I. Seeing the ecological significance
Being just under the water's surface and mostly invisible means we rarely give plankton their due. But these organisms are keystone species of the ocean, playing a pivotal role in the delicately balanced marine and atmospheric systems. Beginning with respiration: every second breath we take involves inhaling the oxygen phytoplankton produces; afterwards they metabolize and absorb our exhaled and otherwise produced CO2; and as the base of the marine food system, they provide nutrients for marine animals and, consequently and indirectly, for us.
How can we extend our sensory capacities to work with them, to learn to listen to their voices and to tell their stories?
To find our connection, we collect water samples and spend hours in front of the microscope. However, what we see is not the species itself, but its representation, an image. The perception of this image therefore comes from doing rather than passively looking. As a tool for intervention, it transforms the invisible into the visible, allowing us to manipulate and create new phenomena that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Looking through the tubes of a microscope together, we see plankton magically emerging from the transparent drops of water, finding new meanings to which we can attune when looking at communities, media, collectives, and individuals moving in front of our eyes. And it is not only them who are on the move.
As marine species feed on plankton, they’re willing to move towards them at surface level – every day and every night in a process called Diel Vertical Migration. We humans discovered this by chance. While searching the seafloor for potential predators – meaning other submarines – the U.S. Navy was taking sonar readings of the ocean during WW2 when they discovered the deep scattering layer (DSL). Initially mistaken for the seafloor, this moving layer revealed the dynamic nature of marine life. And they asked themselves – why is the floor moving?
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II. The art of tuning into each other
Most marine mammals know quite a bit about how to intentionally perceive sound. They use high frequencies to locate where they are, and low frequencies to reach out to each other through the increasing ambient noise in a process known as echolocation. Although it overlaps with communication, it is not the same. Echolocation is mapping the world in relation to you and also mapping you in relation to the world. It always comes from within the animal, helping it to find prey, navigate and locate peers.
On the other hand, the technology that humans use to perceive the environment – echo sounding – stems from military developments and serves oftentimes contrary purposes within science, activism and fishing. It involves transmitting acoustic waves into water and recording the time interval between emission and the return of a pulse; it makes it possible to determine the distance between sonar and target. Its inventor Alexander Behm knew little about how echo sounding would “revolutionize” fishing, resulting in today’s state of massive overfishing. Today, we are scanning through and across oceans to see what wouldn’t otherwise be visible.
What if we learned instead to humbly listen and take responsibility for our frequencies? To lower our voices so that the sea creatures can speak to us. Only from vibrations can we create worlds that we can sail through together.
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III. Speculating on future forms
How can AI be used as a tool not dissimilar to a camera? Just like developing film in a darkroom, the search for latent vectors can lead us on a journey full of incidental discoveries. By using strictly old language models that have not been trained in the massive archives of the internet, we can stay in the world that plankton created and curate it.
When generating images of these new beings, we follow the footsteps of Karl Sims, who used genetic algorithms for the creation of his Evolving Virtual Creatures. Since his time, the field of computer sciences and the sciences in general have both undergone a sort of revolution towards data driven methods replacing older rule based systems. Instead of discrete rules, we train continuous neural representations.
Plankton, which have been around for a long time – by some estimates for ~3 billion years – vastly predate human life and have survived many rounds of extinction events thanks to their adaptability. By mixing re-imagined plankton species as adapted AI beings living on their own digital chips, we peer into generated glitch-scapes and potentially learn about the rich microcosmos and patterns of living at different sizes and time-scales to ours.
