Interactive artwork inspires optimism for ocean conservation
An artist and ocean scientist collaborated to create an installation that encourages playful reflection on human-environmental impact.
A new art installation at Stanford University features vinyl double exposure photographs displayed on the exterior windows of the Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building and a series of four interactive sculptures that inspire a playful take on human impact in the ocean.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki, M.F.A. ’17, is a San Francisco-based sculptor and installation artist and the inaugural visiting artist at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He developed the installation in close collaboration with Mehr Kumar, B.A., B.S. ’20, a life sciences researcher in the Oceans Department based in the Goldbogen Lab at Hopkins Marine Station, during a year-long residency, which was jointly sponsored by the school and Stanford’s Office of the Vice President for the Arts.
Baugh-Sasaki, Kumar, and a panel of Stanford artists and scientists came together with community members on October 30 to discuss the artwork and the creative intersections of science and art for sustainability during the 20th anniversary celebration of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
As scientists, we spend a lot of time recording the natural world. This is a cool example of the natural world also recording us. ”
Reconstructing the history of the Southern Ocean
The Southern Ocean – the ocean surrounding Antarctica – is critical for absorbing atmospheric carbon, regulating global temperature, and providing habitat for some of the largest animals on the planet, baleen whales. Intensive 20th century whaling in the Southern Ocean eliminated nearly one million whales in just 70 years. The loss of these “ecosystem engineers” resulted in a domino effect that decimated krill populations and reduced key nutrients like iron critical to ocean productivity.
Kumar is a marine ecologist, artist, and environmental justice advocate working with an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers funded by the Wood’s Institute’s Environmental Venture Projects to reconstruct this historical ecosystem prior to human disruption in order to inform conservation and restoration goals.
The team is using geological, biological, and chemical approaches to analyze a Southern Ocean sediment core – a vertical column of compacted seabed layers deposited over time. Each layer contains a record of the corresponding time period, similar to the rings of a tree. “As scientists, we spend a lot of time recording the natural world,” said Kumar. “This is a cool example of the natural world also recording us.”
Creating our own geology
Kumar saw an opportunity to incorporate art as an additional method of scientific inquiry in the project, not just a way of communicating findings to the public after the fact. Throughout his career and artistic repertoire, Baugh-Sasaki has investigated “how we change the world around us, our role within it, and how we can imagine and work towards a better future.” Brought together by the new visiting artist program, Kumar and Baugh-Sasaki sought to develop an artwork that would explore a question that seemed unanswerable by scientific tools: What does it mean to restore a natural ecosystem like the Southern Ocean to its “pristine” condition (that is, prior to human intervention), especially in a world where future human activity is inevitable?
The installation includes two related art pieces. The first, Double Negatives, represents Kumar and Baugh-Sasaki’s uncommon collaboration. The pair traveled to coastal California locations and captured photographs on the same roll of film to create layered double-exposure images. For Baugh-Sasaki, the piece illuminates how we create our own geology based on our unique perceptions of place.
“Landscape and geology is recorded in both the physical sedimentation of the material [and] also in the human emotion and human history and experience that gets embedded within the land,” he said.
The second piece, Sea of Dust, is composed of four acrylic cylinders filled with seawater and iron filings. Each column, which echoes the shape of a sediment core, is mounted on an aluminum base that viewers can use to invert the tubes. As viewers spin the columns, the powder-like iron will oxidize and rust over the course of the next year, acting as a visual record of human interaction.
‘The poetry is in the correspondence between the two’
Following the unveiling of the art installation, Baugh-Sasaki and Kumar discussed their collaboration in a conversation moderated by Kim Beil, an Stanford art historian and lecturer. They were joined by Hideo Mabuchi, a professor of applied physics who is also a ceramicist and textile artist; and Rob Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor of Earth system science and an author.
Mabuchi highlighted how science and art can operate at very different scales. As a physicist, his work often leads to broad abstractions about the world that he sees as a pathway to improving his intuition about physical processes. In contrast, his work as a maker is more granular with a focus on “trying to develop a long-term relationship with a natural material.” For Mabuchi, science and art are two different ways of coming to know the world rather than mutually exclusive practices. “Really, the poetry is in the correspondence between the two,” he said.
Jackson commented that Sea of Dust embraces a playfulness and curiosity that ties into both artistic and scientific practice. In contrast to many look-but-do-not-touch art installations, the artwork encourages interaction and prompts questions.
The complex swirling of dark iron filings with seawater when a tube is inverted was particularly striking to Mabuchi. He drew a parallel to the human experience of environmental and climate change where “even very slow things can be really turbulent and chaotic and unpredictable.”
Baugh-Sasaki and Kumar spoke about optimism as a key to effective sustainability action and warned against creating “monuments to doom and gloom.” Kumar shared how the philosophy of restorative justice – which requires one to both acknowledge harm and accept responsibility in cases of wrongdoing – can be a helpful framework for finding the balance between realism and optimism in environmentally focused art and science.
“Hope is a muscle that you have to constantly exercise,” said Jackson, noting how both art and science provide pathways for hope. Jackson’s book Into the Clear Blue Sky, released earlier this year, explores the question of what kinds of narratives and values we need in addition to scientific and technical tools to restore the atmosphere in an era of human-caused climate change.
“Every tenth of a degree matters, every single thing we do matters somewhere and to someone in the world,” said Jackson.
Mabuchi is also the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute, a member of Bio-X, and a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Jackson is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.
Principal investigators on the Environmental Venture Projects research include Elizabeth Hadly, a professor of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences and of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability; and professor Rob Dunbar and associate professor Jeremy Goldbogen in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s Oceans Department. Goldbogen is also an associate professor (by courtesy) of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Hadly is the Paul S. and Billie Achilles Professor in Environmental Biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Dunbar is also the W.M. Keck Professor, a professor of Earth system science in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Arts and sustainability
Explore More
-
In a test of their new analysis tool, researchers show where “moving up” or “moving over” may make the most sense for those affected by the 2022 Pakistan flood, and what costs it would entail.
-
Stanford Earth transitioned the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) into its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative in 2020. As part of an effort to celebrate and discuss identity, five Stanford Earth community members talk about how mental health has informed and impacted their careers.