SERIES

FROM A WHALE’S BACK

Yolande Harris’ From a Whale’s Back (2020) is an installation that explores the visual and sonic underwater world inhabited by whales of different species—orcas, humpbacks, and minke whales—from Antarctica to the northeastern Pacific. It uses video taken from tags used by scientists to monitor whales. From A Whale’s Back explores the latest technology for researching behavioral characteristics of whales, using tags suction-cupped to the back of the whale. Simple advances in technology (miniaturization, power, storage) are enabling collection of data in a way that begins to provide an exponentially more detailed view/image of the underwater world from the perspective of animals in it. Video cameras, combined with hydrophones and other sensors, literally allow our human eyes to dive with these animals.

What we see through the camera lens, our surrogate eyes, is not exactly what or how the whale sees, yet it takes us to a place of understanding we have not been before. It opens a world to us. Viewing it, we absorb the speed, the floating relationality of other animals (comparable to antigravity in the ways it flips our physiological assumptions) and the need to breathe by breaking through the surface before diving again. At the point where the whale surfaces, we see and feel our air-breathing world, before diving below for many minutes. There is a strangeness in breaking the surface and trying to orient oneself in distance and sky, a distinct change from the closeness of the underwater world. Considering this, what are we doing peeking into their world? Knowing that technology both enables and inhibits understanding at the same time—that what we see is extraordinary and yet what we don’t see may be more important—how do we apprehend this material? How do we learn while understanding the privilege of our viewpoint?

Thanks to marine biologist Dr Ari Friedlaender , who collected the video data from the whale tags during his recent scientific research projects. Videos are collected under NMFS permit, using lightweight tags, skillfully placed and humanely attached with suction cups that release within twenty four hours.

Video, sound and music, composed and performed by Yolande Harris.

HOW YOU SHIMMER: SOUND PORTAL FOR WHALE BUBBLES

How You Shimmer: Sound Portal for Whale Bubbles, the result of research for Atmosphere of Sound, builds on my ideas of sonic materiality, sound portals, and the underwater sound world of whales. How might I place myself within ocean intelligences by listening expansively, and resisting hierarchies of knowledge? How might human technological extensions – scientific hydrophones, data collecting whale tags – offer opportunities to deepen our listening within global ecosystems? How can a multi sensorial approach to sound shift our perspectives on the ocean, re-orienting our awareness towards non-human intelligences and life-forms? A sound portal is the opportunity to explore such states of sonic reorientation.Video, sound and music, composed and performed by Yolande Harris.

Rather than start from the whales sounds, in How You Shimmer I became curious to know more about their bubbles. Whales blow bubbles in a variety of circumstances, the well known is the collaborative ‘bubble-net feeding’ where humpbacks create a net of bubbles around a shoal of fish. Drawing from images created out of data from the whale tags, I sculpted the humpback’s traces during bubble net feeding, and cast them in bronze, three dimensional, heavy spiraled objects to be held and turned in ones hands. I carved outlines from the videos on artificial human bones and cast them in bronze, an inverted kind of ‘scrimshaw’, the nineteenth century whaler’s craft of carving on whale bones. I looked again at the videos of bubble net feeding from the viewpoint of a tag placed on a whale’s back, just behind the blowhole. Stopping the frames, I outlined the transforming shapes of the bubbles, noticing how they begin whole, form larger bubbles, distort, and gradually fragment. What communication might bubbles make? Sound and listening places us in a receptive attention towards these liminal zones of potential.

Excerpt form Yolande Harris’ text catalogue.