Speculative Dolphin Theatre

Bottlenose dolphins glide through turquoise pools, incognizant of the security cameras beyond the glass panes of their world. It is an elegant underwater choreography of twirling, bubbling, intertwining bodies. The cetaceans are indifferent to your gaze, until one turns sharply, propelling herself to the glass viewing window. She makes direct eye contact with you, then bumps her head against the glass, imploring you to acknowledge her. With this confrontation, you cease to be a passive observer. The glass screen becomes the surface where your world and her’s collide — a site of spectacle, speculation, surveillance, and voyeurism.

Two three-channel video stills, Speculative Dolphin Theatre (2017)

Surveillance camera capturing underwater research footage used as the basis for the Speculative Dolphin Theatre Project.




Speculative Dolphin Theatre

Three-channel video installation with six-channel audio, twenty-four minute loop.
(2017)

Surveillance footage of captive bottlenose dolphins, hydrophone recordings, and behavioral data, dubbed with sound design illustrating the dolphins’ phenomenological experience, along with speculative translation of dolphin communication read by voice actors in English.

Written and produced in collaboration with Dr. Christine Johnson, cognitive scientist and Principal Investigator at UC San Diego's Dolphin Cognition Laboratory.  Exhibited at the Gallery at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Technology (Calit2). San Diego, CA.

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A single-channel version of the video available for online screening:



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Speculative Dolphin Theatre. Installation view. (2017)

Speculative Dolphin Theatre. Installation view. (2017)
Speculative Dolphin Theatre. Installation view. (2017)


Installation view. Gallery at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Technology (Calit2). San Diego, CA (2017)

Speculative Dolphin Theatre is an immersive installation that explores the sites where human and nonhuman animal worlds come into contact with one another. Glass planes and camera lenses become substrates for an exploration of a dolphin phenomenology, with concurrent views capturing the quotidian, day-to-day movements and social dramas of captive bottlenose dolphins, while shifting auditory soundscapes generate a sequence of alternate, speculative realities. 

Along with videographic research footage and hydrophone recordings, parsed-out behavioral data are the work’s formative underpinnings, situating the project between the empirical, objective approaches of research and the experiential and generative aspects of artistic process. Some portions of the narrative voiceover scripts are scientifically credible, drawing from behavioral patterns discovered in the lab through multi-scalar analyses of dolphin interaction. From a scientific standpoint, this project is meant to highlight the complexity, ambiguity, and problematics intrinsic to performing observational animal research, but the overlaid sonic scapes are creatively synthetic, drawing from strategies in science fiction, poetry, and the performing arts to generate hybrid, human-cetacean ruminations, sensory inundation, and a destabilizing of our anthropocentric frame of reference.

Situated at the intersection of art and science, the project illuminates the many potential explanations for animal behavior through the lens of a speculative theater that adds a literary, cross-disciplinary and performative perspective.