Invisible Kelp Forest: From Smell to Sound (2024)

‘Invisible Kelp Forest’ is a collaboratively-written speculative fiction, forthcoming in the journal Plant Perspectives. It draws formal inspiration from Ursula K. LeGuin’s ‘Author of Acacia Seeds’, which itself is written in the style of a scientific report in a hypothetical journal. LeGuin’s original story imagines how human scientists might come to decipher the writing forms of several organisms. We offer a variation on LeGuin’s story by changing the imaginary scientific discipline from ‘therolinguistics’ (beast languages) to ‘sensorialogics’. Our objective was to imagine translating not writing, but the sensation of underwater olfaction. In the story, we substitute our own names/initials for the fictional scientists that LeGuin uses. Research for ‘Invisible Kelp Forest’ was based on our site-specific research snorkelling the kelp forests Santa Barbara, supported by a grant from the Ocean Memory Project and we are grateful to Christoph Pierre for allowing us to observe the porcelain crabs and spiny brittle stars at the tanks he manages at UC Santa Barbara.

Eli Stine has composed four companion pieces to ‘Invisible Kelp Forest’ (below).

A Patiently Put Together Mosaic (2019)

A very short film from joining a 2019 research cruise on the R/V Sally Ride.

Gull Island (2018)

My next project traces a media ecology of kelp. This is a rough cut of footage from the Channel Islands.

Not to be written but absorbed (2016)

The following talk was recorded for an online conference, “The World in 2050.”

In July 2014 I conducted comparative research on two different types of "underwater museums" in Mexico: the Museo Subacuático del Arte (MUSA) off the coast of Isla Mujeres, and two cenotes or underwater cavern systems in Tulum. The following video details several additional diving spots that I visited. To skip to the museum research, see minute 10:30.