Philip Liu

The physical world is being digitized. The digital descendants of the phonautograph allow capturing and storing sound waves, and they are being replicated into the digital world. Meanwhile, recent photogrammetry and other AI-based computer vision techniques are dragging rigid objects such as rocks, buildings, sculptures, and human figures into digital realms. How about ocean waves? Phenomena related to water flows are probably among the last entities resisting the authoritarianism of digitization. Due to their dynamic nature and transparent materiality, fluids are hard for machines to capture exactly, thus remaining abstract and ambiguous phenomena for them.

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In this regard, I consider ocean waves to be one of the last aesthetic real-world phenomena capable of engaging the senses of both humans and machines. A sampled ocean wave would be a pseudo-replica, inherently incomplete, yet it enables new possibilities such as remotely delivering the current status of the ocean. However, the posthuman would need to supplement this incompleteness with their biological imagination. Posthumans and machines would cooperate to fully appreciate new types of artworks containing digitized ocean waves or other water flows in the future.

In this artwork, the audience becomes the imaginary posthuman, standing at a point and appreciating ocean waves from various coasts. They gaze and listen to waves from multiple coasts through their ability of multi-presence with artificially evolved ears and eyes. They will appreciate the beauty across different spacetimes: a beach on the East Sea of Korea now, another seashore on the East Sea of Korea last month, a beach on the South Sea of Korea now, and a beach on the West Sea of Korea few days ago.

Two aesthetic concepts are suggested here: 'substitutional imagination' and 'appreciation of superposed patterns. The substitutional imagination involves outsourcing a part of one's imagination to another entity. The audience and the machines substitute part of their imagination for each other; in other words, they become dependent on each other. The appreciation of superposed patterns is what posthumans, with completely renovated neural structures that can process and analyze multiple streams of senses, would do when facing an aesthetic object: synthesizing a new sensation from the multiple streams.

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In the exhibition space, a renovated large industrial factory, there is a 15m x 7m screen on the floor digitally reproducing ocean waves through a fluid particle simulation, originating from the four mentioned coasts. Each audience member can either focus on one ocean wave or appreciate the overall scene and how the waves from different spacetimes are merged in a digital world. These waves, originating from different coasts or times, were impossible to meet in reality.

There are four speakers at the corners, playing the soundscapes of the coasts in real-time with 360-degree audio (Ambisonics). Each of the speakers can be physically rotated by an audience member, allowing each soundscape to be explored. The currently headed direction of the speaker corresponds to the direction of the sound from the linked coast

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The 'ocean wave superposition' occurs in this regard, as multiple ocean waves originating from different places are overlayed and co-exist in the exhibition space. The ‘superposed’ pattern here is mere an imaginary prototype of the new art form that would arise in the future, only can be executed by posthumans who have multiple ears and eyes in remote places and multiple lanes of perception to the brain.