Alum Elly Vadseth will talk about using art to bring new perspectives to ocean exploration at an event celebrating the power of creative collaborations
Artist Elly Vadseth, AG18 (MFA), in a video still from a performance. She is using her art to examine how new technologies are changing our relationship with the deep sea. Photo: Courtesy of Vadseth
The deep sea is a fascinating place, filled with extraordinary creatures and unique communities thriving in cold, crushing darkness. But it has remained one of the least-explored ecosystems on the planet, thanks to harsh conditions that are challenging for both humans and technology.
Recent developments in sensors and robotics are making deep sea habitats more accessible for scientists, governments, and private companies. Elly Vadseth, AG18 (MFA), an interdisciplinary artist and Ph.D. fellow in artistic research at the Institute for Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, is using her art as a medium to examine how these new technologies are changing our relationship with the deep sea.
“With my art I seek to create more empathy, wonder, and care towards these unknown worlds,” Vadseth said. “At the same time, I want to create works that also point at the tensions between human deep-sea activity and the complex communities of species that live down in the depths, species we know so little about.”
Vadseth will talk about her work on March 6 at Tufts’ Art and Society: Dialogues hosted by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA) in collaboration with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Corporate and Foundation Relations. The event is co-chaired by Mary Ellen Strom, an SMFA professor of the practice, and Elaine Short, an assistant professor at the School of Engineering.
Short said Vadseth’s bridging of science and art exemplifies the culture of interdisciplinary work at Tufts.
“Coming from an engineering background, I'm especially excited about the number of STEM faculty who are participating in our upcoming event and their enthusiasm for building connections with SMFA,” she said. “We expect to see some really exciting collaborations emerge from this event, and look forward to seeing how those ideas evolve over time as part of our unique ‘Tufts’ approach to intellectual inquiry.”
Vadseth sets up a camera for a durational performance amidst a blizzard in Berlevåg/Bearalváhki, a small fishing village in the Arctic tip of Norway where she is doing artistic research. Photo: Daria Klima
Vadseth is part of an interdisciplinary research project at her university called Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change. She is collaborating with deep sea archeologists, a media scholar, a film scholar, an anthropologist, an art historian, and other artists to bring new perspectives to how emerging technologies are opening up deep sea habitats for human exploration, expansion, and exploitation.
“I’m interested in these ecosystems that are mostly inaccessible to our physical bodies, and looking at the emerging ways of relating to the species and neighborhoods in the deep sea,” Vadseth said. “I’m using creative strategies such as performance, video, and installations to animate those changes.”
Collaborating with scientists and technologists opens up new ways for her to work, imagine, and contextualize her practice, Vadseth said. And it’s an exchange that goes both ways—throughout the Deep Sea project the interdisciplinary researchers are sharing knowledge and methods, and even taking part in each other’s work.
This past fall, Vadseth created a participatory choreography involving the whole research team for the section of the Deep Sea project intended to promote ocean literacy. Part of the group took part in the Trondheim fjord performance with movements and costumes informed by deep sea processes and creatures, while the other researchers filmed the performers with underwater technology, turning the lens of deep-sea operations onto the humans who research them.
The research group took part in a hydrochoreography performance in the Trondheim fjord with movements and costumes informed by deep sea processes and creatures. Photo: Rosann Hammer
These recordings will be included in a larger video installation, which Vadseth hopes to use to make the deep sea less foreign to the general public.
Vadseth’s work often falls outside the strictures of what one might expect to see at a typical art museum. She credits the SMFA program and her mentors at Tufts for encouraging her to push boundaries and reach across various artistic mediums. After graduating, she continued to work with Strom on several large-scale performance projects with a public art organization in Montana called Mountain Time Arts.
“Being part of the nuts and bolts of those projects gave me the perspective and skills needed to think and work outside the box and, when I came back to Norway, to not be contained by a gallery space,” Vadseth said.
She has created public art works in a variety of sites, including a recent virtual installation in augmented reality on an island in the inner Oslo Fjord with collaborator Boris Kourtoukov and a video installation at an old king crab factory and lighthouse in the Norwegian Arctic.
Visualizing the deep sea is one aspect of Vadseth’s Ph.D. work. Over the course of her research, she has embedded herself in three locations—the Oslo Fjord, the Trondheim Fjord, and Norway’s Arctic coast—where small boat fisheries are in direct contact with a shifting constellation of ocean species. She hopes her work can open up new perspectives and relationships with these changes.
Some fish populations in these areas are declining or moving elsewhere as a result of climate change and other human impacts. But some species, such as ctenophores and jellyfish, seem to be thriving. Vadseth is particularly enamored with ctenophores—small, gelatinous animals that propel themselves through the ocean with rows of fine, hair-like cilia.
Vadseth collaborated with the artist Boris Kourtoukov to create an augmented reality experience centered on ctenophores—small, gelatinous animals that have endured through massive planetary shifts and extinctions. Photo: Courtesy of Vadseth
They lack a central brain, are hermaphroditic (capable of producing both eggs and sperm), and at least one species is considered invasive in the waters around Norway. Vadseth is exploring what we can learn from these creatures, which have existed in our oceans for hundreds of millions of years.
“These animals navigate with this embodied intelligence, they have this queer perspective and these survival choreographies through time,” Vadseth said. Ctenophores have endured through massive planetary shifts and extinctions. Vadseth suggests that they might act as guides as humanity adapts to the environmental changes we have wrought.
“Society choreographs our bodies to move in a certain way, to interact in a certain way, to relate in a certain way," Vadseth said. "I want to expand people’s embodied imaginations.”
