Have you noticed that when you watch someone move—like watching people dance, or watching your favorite sport—that you almost have to stop yourself from mimicking the movement? That’s because people tend to mirror each other in that way, but what if we paid attention to physically mirroring nature and our environment? Artists Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter used dance and visual art to create a multimedia work to do just that.
“Superradiance” is their video and sound installation, on multiple screens, using dance, poetry, music, and generative imagery to illustrate the connection between people and the planet. It’s part of “Embodied Pacific: Ocean Unseen,” a partnership between UC San Diego’s visual arts department and Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which features projects by 30 artists who spent time working with researchers in the lab, out in the field, and in the archives. It’s part of more than 70 exhibitions and programs that are included in “PST ART: Art & Science Collide,” a regional event looking at how art and science intersect.
Akten is a new media artist and assistant professor in UC San Diego’s visual arts department. Peyton Hofstadter is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and curator who explores the dynamics between human bodies and technology, and is interested in how emerging technology affects culture. They’re both going to discuss their piece, “Superradiance. Embodying Earth,” during the Jeffrey B. Graham “Perspectives on Ocean Science” lecture at Birch Aquarium from 6:30 to 8 p.m. tomorrow (general ission is $12). They took some time to talk about their collaboration with each other and the researchers from Scripps, and what they hope to contribute to conversations about the planet. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: “Superradiance” contains three chapters, with “Emboyding Earth” serving as the second chapter, which looks at the individual, human body extending into the living organism of the entire planet, with trillions of organisms that humans are part of. Can you talk first about how the idea for “Superradiance” came together? What inspired this work?
Akten: The underlying themes really have been part of both my practice and interest, and Katie’s, for many, many years. It’s been an evolving thought process. In particular, I was interested in boundaries and how we invent boundaries. Boundaries seem so clear and obvious to us, but we are kind of inviting the audience to question these boundaries. Some boundaries seem very obvious to us, like skin. Other boundaries seem more amorphous to begin with, like the borders between countries and things like that. So, this has been a theme that I’m very interested in, just the artificiality of boundaries, in general.
With “Superradiance,” we wanted to question the boundary of the skin. We think of the body as what is within the skin and the environment that is outside the skin, but we wanted to kind of nurture this relationship with the environment where the environment is not external to us, but it is part of our body. We were asking the question, what would the world look like if we saw the ocean, we treated it as if it was inside our body, as if it was part of our lungs? Then, maybe we will learn to respect the planet, we will learn to respect each other. We wouldn’t see (part) of our body as resources to be exploited. This is really the heart of what we were exploring with “Superradiance.”
Peyton Hofstadter: During the pandemic, I worked on a couple of public art projects, the Aurora Network and the Climate Clock in New York, and something that was becoming clear to me was this question of embodiment—that knowledge about the magnitude of the problems we’re facing does not, on its own, create the mindset to solve them. And, asking what does? Really wanting to explore the knowing, having the knowledge that we are embedded in a living planet, and being able to feel that connection. Can we create work that helps us go through—in this ritual space, in this sanctuary, and through this process of gratitude—that can help us connect to that feeling in order to be able to change our values?
Q: What was your creative process like, from conceptualizing to execution?
Akten: We were very fortunate to have Scripps Institute of Oceanography as part of the process, and also, for me as UCSD faculty, as neighbors. We had a few conversations with numerous researchers, primarily with SOARS (Scripps Ocean Atmosphere Research Simulator, a 120-foot-long wave tank researchers use to replicate and study air and sea interactions under controlled laboratory conditions). We had lots of conversations with researchers and in those conversations there were kind of two main avenues. One was, let’s say, inspirational. We would have conversations with them and we’d exchange ideas. As artists, we’re taking great liberties with our analogies and our metaphors. As scientists, they know the real nuts and bolts of everything, so we’d share ideas with them, our metaphors with them. For example, the ocean being an extension of our lungs, also the tides, the currents as kind of analogous to a circulatory system, circulating the nutrients around the body of the Earth, etc. So, we would share these concepts and metaphors with them and they would respond with some very specific details, like the way the number of white caps increasing, the white caps in wave breaks, and how that’s symbolizing the increased energy in the oceans and affecting stuff. I can’t the details and we recorded a lot of our conversations, so I don’t want to give incorrect information, but they would respond with certain stories and then that would inspire us, so we wrote a lot of that into our script and we took those stories and wrote that into our script. Then, the other channel through which we wrote the scripts was collecting imagery, in particular, in this case we worked with Charlotte Seid from the museum, the archives. She provided us with thousands of images, which we used in our pipeline. When you watch the film that we made and see dancers in the shape of corals, or other kinds of underwater life, that’s all created from the imagery that was provided to us.
Q: What kinds of conversations did you have with researchers/scientists, and how did those conversations show up in this piece?
Peyton Hofstadter: One thing that I was really inspired by in our conversations with the researchers from SOARS was this discussion of these interfaces between environments, these boundary layers, which Robin Wall Kimmerer also writes about in “Gathering Moss,” and lots of other people have written about, and learning about these incredibly dynamic zones where life is spewed and exhumed and absorbed in this incredibly dynamic way. This is not just the ocean atmosphere interface, we have these boundary layers all over the planet. In “Superradiance,” we have moments where we show transitions. The scales, for example, from stars to marine snow, and in the second part, transitioning between forests to underwater kelp forests, trying to show these incredibly dynamic relationships that we’re embedded in.
One thing I can share is when we were talking to the researchers, there was this really powerful moment where they said, “You know, you’ve been asking a lot of questions, can we ask a question? We’ve worked with artists before and we’ve seen situations where artists have worked with scientists and they’ve taken the information the scientists have given them, and they’ve creative work about how bad things are. And, we’ve seen people walk in and see these exhibits, and we’ve seen the light die in their eyes. Our question for you is, how are you going to use our work to create something that inspires hope and not despair?” This really resonated with me because, going back to past projects, according to the Copernicus data, 2024 is the first year we exceeded a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius. With only this information, I can only act out of fear. How do we inspire hope that is still truthful, that’s still true to our values? So, that was something that already resonated with what we wanted to do, but I think it’s fair to say that conversation really helped us reflect back on what we’re serving here.
Akten: I just want to underline something that Katie mentioned about the idea of interfaces. We were thinking of boundaries and we went in thinking we want to dissolve the idea of boundaries and dissolving the idea of the boundary of the skin as a boundary of the body. One of the metaphors we were thinking of was the surface of the ocean as the skin. The scientists introduced the language of the idea of interfaces, so we can think of boundaries as interfaces and we really like that because “boundary” kind of implies that something ends and something else begins. “Interface,” on the other side, really emphasizes exchange and we like that idea. It’s not that there is no skin, but it’s an interface, so that was quite inspirational for us.
To your question, this definitely was something that we were thinking about already. The phase of shining a light, raising awareness, that had been done; it’s the climate crisis, it doesn’t need raising awareness. So, we were thinking about how can we inspire hope? It’s difficult, I can’t say that we know the answer, but we really wanted to create something that would make people hopeful. Our goal is to try and shift values; there’s different ways of tackling the (multiple) crises that we face. Some are trying to solve it using technological solutions, other people are trying to address it by shifting values and trying to make people see the world in a different way. I think the kind of art that we want to make is very much in that category.
Q: What did you want to say about ocean, the environment, and our place in both as human beings, through your work?
Akten: I think we wanted people to feel love. At the heart of the piece is a dance. You don’t actually see the human body, but you feel a human body in the sense that there is a human body, which is Katie’s body that is dancing. Even though you don’t see her body, it’s her body and her movement which is transforming the environment and moving everything. Sometimes, the body is kind of clear and sometimes you’ll see a mushroom fungus in her shape. Sometimes, we’ll see the tree, the kelp will be in her shape. Rocks might be in the shape of a body and it’s moving and metamorphosing, and there’s many reasons why we chose to do this. One is, putting aside the fact that it’s a dance, just focusing on the fact that there’s a human body there, we did that because there is a known neurological phenomena that when we see someone moving, in our brains, we simulate that movement, we simulate ourselves performing that movement. This simulation happens all over the brain, all the way up to just short of sending the signal to the muscles. This is one of the reasons we appreciate watching dances. Or, depending on the kind of sports that you might be into, you might appreciate someone doing a sport that you like because when you watch someone else do it, you feel it in your body as if you’re doing it. So, this creates a connection between you and the person doing that movement, so we wanted to create this work where fungus, rocks were creating these movements, were moving like a human, so that we wanted you to feel like this is you. You are this rock, you are this tree, this tree is part of you. You are this coral, this coral is part of you, so that’s why we put human movements in there.
The other reason is, dance is, as Katie calls it, one of our earliest biotechnologies. Every culture has a form of dance. Dance is the way that we connect with each other, it’s the traditional way that we form bonds with each other. I’m from Turkey and we have a Sufi tradition, which is the mystical Islamic tradition, and there are whirling dervishes. They spin together and part of the tradition is that, when they move like that together, they all become in sync and their breath and their hearts come into sync. Recent scientific studies have shown that, in fact, their heartbeats do come into sync, which is astonishing, so we wanted to use this very ritualistic, traditional, ancient technology, which is dance, and to bring that back into the conversation.
Peyton Hofstadter: I wanted to help close the gap between knowing and feeling. Dance is one of our earliest biotechnologies. If you want to know how powerful dance is, dance connects us to each other, it connects us to the living environment. Then, we spoke about the history of whirling dervishes and there’s a rich history of ecstatic dance, the idea that you can connect directly to the environment and you don’t need an intermediary, you don’t need a hierarchy, you don’t need a political structure. Dance is incredibly powerful in our history. If you want to know how powerful it is, just look at the history of laws that have been made to outlaw dances, where people aren’t allowed to dance. These are all ways of taking away people’s power because dance has something that powerfully connects us and connects communities, connects us back to the earth.
I think I have also been learning what many communities, including indigenous communities, have been telling us for hundreds of years-that intelligence and consciousness is not a unique, human characteristic and that we’re connected in this living planet. We’re not uniquely conscious intelligent beings, beings walking on its surface, directing activities. I can say, intellectually, that I understand that there’s a giant gyre of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There’s actually a new compound that’s been called plastiglomerate, which is the combination of plastic fused with biomaterial and rock; there will be life that lives on this in millions of years. It’s one thing to intellectually know this, but how do I feel it in my body? We have microplastics, recently discovered that they can cross the brain-blood barrier; we have plastics in our brains. This knowledge of the problem doesn’t seem to give us the mindset we need to solve it. We need to feel something, to shift our values. So, I think with “Superradiance,” it’s just our contribution to this bigger conversation about we need to shift how we feel, we need to shift these deeper values, not just our knowledge, but our felt consciousness about the living Earth.
