Sentience, Sentences, and Sentiment: Sensing Deep-Ocean Sediment through Artistic Practice

Abstract

At this moment of climate crisis, deep-ocean carbon sequestration has been proposed as a strategy to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. The video article Sentience, Sentences, & Sentiment: Sensing Deep-Ocean Sediment through Artistic Practice explores ecological attunement and the role of language in perceiving the more-than-human—specifically the deep-ocean ecosystems facing potential carbon sequestration, ocean acidification, global heating, and eutrophication. The article unfolds an artist’s account of process for kór (core). An interdisciplinary artwork and slow installation, kór (core) features a deep-ocean sediment core extracted between Greenland and Iceland at a depth of 1,682m during a June 2021 science research cruise. In Icelandic, kór means choir or chorus; it is pronounced similarly to the English-language core. The article features video aboard the research vessel, the acquisition of the core, conceptual documentation of the resulting artwork kór (core), participant interviews, soundscape recordings, and an aria composed through the installation.kór (core) performs a slow installation as a point of activation, where community members contribute to, think with, and create in the context of considering the sentient being-ness of sediment. On a chalkboard, community members mark their reactions to and within the presence of deep-ocean water and sediment. This article shows multilingual sense-making (English, Icelandic, Polish, Danish, Spanish) and the sensorial materialities of bodies (human, cetacean, water, etc.) in the contexts of marine-terrestrial biospheres impacted by the climate crisis. The video aims to elucidate a creative investigation into an expanded notion of relations—crucial for collaborative survivorship in our multi-entity worldings.