THE SEA AROUND US
In my video installation The Sea Around Us,
commissioned by the Laguna Art Museum for the 2022 Art & Nature Festival, I directly reference Rachel Carson’s book of the same title. The installation is
a 360° immersive and cinematic experience that portrays the adjacent Pacific
Ocean as a fully animated body as well as a place of deep interconnectedness
where multispecies kinship fosters a sense of awe within us.
The Sea Around Us, 2022. 360° immersive experience consisting of 6-channel HD video and 7.1 surround sound. 34 min. (loop). 1,377 sq.ft., 51 ft. long x 34 ft. wide x 15 ft. high.
The Sea Around Us contends with past environmental abuse right off the Southern California coast. Beginning in 1947 and continuing through at least 1961, employees of Montrose Chemical Corporation dumped barrels of the pesticide DDT and acid sludge waste into the ocean near Santa Catalina Island. (In 1972 the Environmental Protection Agency largely banned the use of DDT in the United States because of its adverse environmental effects and its potential risks to human health.) Investigation by scientists is ongoing, but it appears that the equivalent of around half a million barrels of chemicals, including uncontained DDT, was dumped into the ocean at fourteen sites. These toxic materials have bioaccumulated across the food web, affecting the lives of our human and non-human kin. The Sea Around Us incorporates footage captured by robots sampling the contents of disintegrating barrels on the ocean floor.
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In The Sea Around Us, we are guided by the abalone, a shelled marine snail that reflects the time immemorial of the sea, informing the imagery and cosmology of cultures both ancient and present. These include the Tongva people, who began living on Catalina at least eight thousand years ago, and the Acjachemen, who have lived along the coast of what is now Orange County for at least ten thousand years. Poetry inspired by the Tongva worldview frames The Sea Around Us. Flowing through the experience is an Acjachemen song intended to encourage listeners to embrace the natural world through alternative values and worldviews. Ultimately we are asked to be courageous enough to face our exploitative legacy, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating its folly by being fully engaged as we collectively reckon with and care for our troubled world.
Over the last century, extractivism and control of the ocean have engendered environmental catastrophes in the California Bight, one of the most urbanized, industrialized and yet biodiverse bays on the planet. By featuring local Indigenous voices prominently, The Sea Around Us is a call to action to come to terms with the criticality of today’s environmental crises through the expansion of our fixed terranean sensory experience to the ever-changing waterscape of oceanic depths. Immersed in local Indigenous people’s waterscapes long enough, I believe that we can inspire a much needed shift in the ways in which we relate to the ocean and the natural world at large.
I commissioned composer Drew Schnurr to create the score for The Sea Around Us, which he describes as follows: “The score reflects our oceans’ beauty, depth, and power, framed by the perspective of feminine strength and indigenous wisdom. A unity of both sung and spoken female voices blended with the sounds of sea life (organic and robotic) represents our collective imperative to reëstablish balance and accordance with our natural world.”
The Sea Around Us, 2022. 360° immersive experience consisting of 6-channel HD video and 7.1 surround sound. 34 min. (loop). 1,377 sq.ft., 51 ft. long x 34 ft. wide x 15 ft. high.
The Sea Around Us contends with past environmental abuse right off the Southern California coast. Beginning in 1947 and continuing through at least 1961, employees of Montrose Chemical Corporation dumped barrels of the pesticide DDT and acid sludge waste into the ocean near Santa Catalina Island. (In 1972 the Environmental Protection Agency largely banned the use of DDT in the United States because of its adverse environmental effects and its potential risks to human health.) Investigation by scientists is ongoing, but it appears that the equivalent of around half a million barrels of chemicals, including uncontained DDT, was dumped into the ocean at fourteen sites. These toxic materials have bioaccumulated across the food web, affecting the lives of our human and non-human kin. The Sea Around Us incorporates footage captured by robots sampling the contents of disintegrating barrels on the ocean floor.
In The Sea Around Us, we are guided by the abalone, a shelled marine snail that reflects the time immemorial of the sea, informing the imagery and cosmology of cultures both ancient and present. These include the Tongva people, who began living on Catalina at least eight thousand years ago, and the Acjachemen, who have lived along the coast of what is now Orange County for at least ten thousand years. Poetry inspired by the Tongva worldview frames The Sea Around Us. Flowing through the experience is an Acjachemen song intended to encourage listeners to embrace the natural world through alternative values and worldviews. Ultimately we are asked to be courageous enough to face our exploitative legacy, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating its folly by being fully engaged as we collectively reckon with and care for our troubled world.
Over the last century, extractivism and control of the ocean have engendered environmental catastrophes in the California Bight, one of the most urbanized, industrialized and yet biodiverse bays on the planet. By featuring local Indigenous voices prominently, The Sea Around Us is a call to action to come to terms with the criticality of today’s environmental crises through the expansion of our fixed terranean sensory experience to the ever-changing waterscape of oceanic depths. Immersed in local Indigenous people’s waterscapes long enough, I believe that we can inspire a much needed shift in the ways in which we relate to the ocean and the natural world at large.
I commissioned composer Drew Schnurr to create the score for The Sea Around Us, which he describes as follows: “The score reflects our oceans’ beauty, depth, and power, framed by the perspective of feminine strength and indigenous wisdom. A unity of both sung and spoken female voices blended with the sounds of sea life (organic and robotic) represents our collective imperative to reëstablish balance and accordance with our natural world.”
