As artists-at-sea, we (Shona Kitchen, Alyson Ogasian) participated in a cruise entitled “Designing The Future.” Cruise #1 took place in 2019 off the coast of Hawaii, Cruise #2, 2021 off the coast of San Diego, CA.      

Approach, Concept:
As this is the largest and least-explored environment on earth, and home to as many as one million undescribed species, our intention was to present the oceanic column as a space between known and unknown, and to offer a window into another world that in may appear to be grounded in unreality, despite being located on our own planet. Our goal was to pique human curiosity about this environment while drawing together historic and contemporary scientific observations, local mythologies, legends, histories, and beliefs surrounding this region.
We considered Falkor a species along with the gelatinous animals or larvaceans we would come across in the midwaters off the coast of Hawaii and San Diego. We were inspired by Jules Verne’s description of Captain Nemo’s submarine the Nautilus, which was mistaken for a sea monster in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.1
We reflected on notions of home, community, survival, adaptation, and protection, and to think of planet Earth as one big habitat. Exploring the similarities between the Falkor, SuBastian, and the organisms that inhabit the “Twilight Zone”–the scientific term for the area between the surface where light is plentiful and the deep ocean where light cannot reach. For example, comparing the 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. Artwork (methodology + outcome):
A “cabinet-of-curiosities” entitled Another Twilight Zone.
Historically, enlightenment-era cabinets-of-curiosity presented natural and man-made objects, artifacts, and artworks in a single place in order to articulate a specific vision or model of a dynamic and transforming natural history. Considered the precursors to natural history museums, they created analogies and relationships between artifacts or representations of the natural world and served as the starting point for speculations on philosophy, science, and natural history. Often these collections provided the first glimpses of new species or relayed images, renderings, or accounts collected from previously unexplored or distant regions of the world, presenting the work of artists and scientists within the same space.
We worked with Dr. Brennan Phillips to develop camera housings for DEEPi. The form of these housings was inspired by plastiglomerate, a new type of stone that is a mixture of sedimentary grains of sand and molten plastic as a binder. Found in abundance on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii, plastiglomerate is most commonly formed when plastic waste is melted in campfires into the sand below. Our camera housings are designed to be tethered to Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) SuBastian, and to function as sessile “organisms” living symbiotically within its architecture, observing the habits and life cycle of the ROV in order to playfully “describe” SuBastian as a hybrid species within the midwater.
We constructed systems for observing varying phenomena, and new media to document our discoveries. We documented everything on, in, and above the water column site: ocean, boat, scientists, jellyfish, and the otherworldly structures of the siphonophores.
From our body of research, utilizing 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 completed on location, we created a contemporary, multimedia version of a cabinet of curiosity; an array of weird artifacts (both digital and physical), each inspired by various fragments, experiences, findings, and processes carried out on the R/V Falkor. Each artifact serves as a narrative, connecting human, machine, ocean, and the inhabitants below the anchored Falkor, similar to those described in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”.
Another Twilight Zone was housed in a customized Pelican case (BX135 Cargo Case, approximately 94cm × 30cm × 33cm.) Alterations were made to allow for ease of display and plug-n-play power connectivity. It is an unassuming form which is the de- facto standard of any modern day expedition; a carrier of everything scientific and technological, designed to withstand the extremities of far off lands/seas.

Video, audio production by artists. Video editing Emily Bright.