Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Sensing the Wrack is a collaborative research project that combines art, technology, and ecology. The project originated during a field research trip in Bodø, Norway, in the summer of 2022. Together we investigate the rising waters, rhythms of the tides, and expanding coastlines as a site for practice-based arts research and speculative future imaginings with seaweed and kelp.

We sense the intertidal zone between low and high tide. The size and shape of the zone changes with time – with every wave, tide, day, week, and year, but also over centuries and periods. Nonetheless, there seems to be a permanency to the intertidal zone. The experience of being taken aback when the tide is much higher or lower than expected is a testimony to this. We use technology to extend our capacity to capture, monitor, quantify, and amplify our surroundings. We also acknowledge that relying on technology can potentially alter and limit our innate ability to sense things beyond the digital realm. Digital tools can inadvertently shield, filter, and restrict what we can perceive without them. Feeling with technology opens possibilities of changing our point of view – altering how we experience the world, the sea, and the wrack as more than human. Our experience beyond ourselves becomes a kind of digital presencing, extending our sensing capacity of the wrack as an opportunity to cultivate and expand how we navigate creative field research as a performative mediated practice of liveness.