Liquid Strata installation: art-purposed modelling of the ocean’s Twilight Zone

The capacity of art to create new media content and to approach non-intuitive concepts makes it a powerful tool to communicate research. However, deploying art as “a communication” tool comes with the risk of producing a work of limited artistic interest. Finding the right balance between these two goals is a complex challenge.

In this presentation, we will describe the conceptualisation and realisation of the project Liquid Strata, a project led by an oceanographer, Joan Llort, and the artists Entangled Others and Daphne Xanthopoulou, that sought to reflect on the visual representation and the limitations of observing the mesopelagic ecosystem. Liquid Strata is a digital sculptural installation curated by Lluis Nacenta first presented in the 2024 SonarMies edition under the Sonar+D Festival program in Barcelona (Spain). It was designed as a gate into the mesopelagic, a vast ocean ecosystem covering the global oceanic layer between 200 and 1000 meters deep. The mesopelagic, also known as the Twilight Zone due to the dimmed sunlight that reaches it, is one of the largest and least well-known, yet already threatened, ecosystems on Earth.

The main conceptual challenge of this collaboration was to produce a digital visualisation of a region and a phenomenon (the “marine snow”) that is extremely hard to observe. The scarcity of visual data imposed an alternative approach. The strategy applied by the Entangled Others and Joan Llort was to model the dynamics of the particles and fauna populating the mesopelagic, similarly to what researchers do when modelling the ocean carbon cycle but with an artistic purpose. This paradigm change forced us to review the literature and identify mechanisms that can be visually attractive despite not being the dominant drivers of the carbon cycle. The installation also made explicit the limitations of observing the deep ocean and how research tries to explain and understand an ecosystem that is so vast that is almost inconceivable for the human mind. Throughout the work we purposedly drifted away from pure aesthetics, trying to visualise the scientific concepts rather than embellishing them. In this sense, the soundscape was generated based on data acquired from underwater sonar but only working with infrasounds and avoiding the sounds of whales and other marine mammals commonly used in outreach.

The presentation will describe the concept and the methodology behind the artwork as well as some of the many challenges faced during this interdisciplinary collaboration. The last two minutes will showcase a video of the installation accompanied by an immersive soundscape.