Serenades for Settling
Listening with oysters.
“Serenades for Settling” is an immersive sound and visual experience that explores the impact of anthropogenic sound on the heroic oyster, a vital member of our marine ecosystems.
About the Project
Serenades for Settling is a multimedia installation focused on the listening body of the heroic oyster. A water filter, sea level mitigator and food source, the oyster is a vital member of our ecosystem that knows habitats for settlement by sensing sound. Research has found that the bottom-dwelling oyster knows suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. For oysters, sound is a more reliable indicator than chemical exudates or patterns of light. The project leverages data of harbor port movement and local sound to query the dynamic relationships between human activity and the wellbeing of oysters. Using field recordings, generative data, animations and robotic oysters, the installation speculatively emulates an oyster’s habitat and the impacts of human noise disruptions in NYC’s waterways. It playfully imagines how we can care for oysters through our own listening habits and serenades.
The project expresses thematic content through an immersive sound, visual and sculpted environment, and by virtual and in-person means, dependent on exhibition and performance opportunities. Through the simulated sense of this sonically navigating being, and participatory and responsive engagement mechanisms, we animate questions such as: how do we listen for safe harbors, and what do they sound like; how do we tend to the more-than-human-world and how does it tend to us? And can the listening oyster guide us to a politics of mutual tending?
The project is being created through aquatic research with the Billion Oyster Project (billionoysterproject.org), a NYC based nonprofit working to ecologically restore the city’s waterways through oyster reseeding/repopulating initiatives. The initial phase of the sound responsive robotic oysters were developed in collaboration with Professor Karthik Dantu, Director of the Center for Embodied Autonomy and Robotics (CEAR)and sound artist Travis Johns. with an earlier version of the system and visuals created by media artist Silvia Ruzanka. and Ben Chang. In 2022 we received a an artist residency with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center in NYC. In 2023 the project was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Award (NYSCA). Additional project technical support and funding is provided by the Department of Art and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo.
In our preliminary project development we have worked with researchers, and resources from the Center for Marine Sciences and Technology at North Carolina State University and the Billion Oyster Project in New York Harbor. We are currently consulting with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and Doug Myers, Maryland Senior Scientist for the Phillip Merrill Environmental Center, is serving as an advisor. In addition, Stephanie Rothenberg has developed research partners through a Fellowship at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (2019) where she advanced her inquiry into oyster habitats with access to their marine science facilities and also local oyster nurseries and aquaculture farms (Mook Sea Farms).