Liquid Chimeras: where ocean data is lacking, speculative forms emerge

Liquid Chimeras

From February 5, 2025
Wednesday to Sunday – 3:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
MEET Digital Culture Center
Viale Vittorio Veneto 2, Milano

Exhibition curated by Eleonora Brizi

With the patronage of Fondazione Cariplo

Over four thousand Argo buoys float in the oceans as a network of distributed scientific instruments. By periodically diving into the depths, they collect essential but inevitably fragmentary data on temperature, salinity, and water composition. Between one measurement point and another, there are gaps in knowledge that do not correspond to lifeless spaces, but to complex ecosystems that remain invisible.

Liquid Chimeras stems from this condition: where information is lacking, spaces for creative possibility open up. Just as in the Middle Ages the absence of scientific knowledge was filled by monstrous and imaginary creatures, symbolic projections of unknown territories, so today the attempt to make visible what exists but escapes direct perception opens up a space for what art has always been able to do: imagine speculative forms that do not explain reality but question it.

Art and science: technology as a tool for visual translation

The duo Entangled Others (Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick) translates this urgency into installations that traverse the twilight zones of the oceans, where pressure makes direct observation impossible. The exhibition, curated by Eleonora Brizi, presents works created during the STUDIOTOPIA artistic and scientific residency, a European program in which MEET participated by hosting the collaboration between Entangled Others and oceanographer Joan Llort.

At the center of the exhibition is Liquid Strata: Argomorphs, 3D-printed metal sculptures developed during the residency, which imagine hybrid entities born from the encounter between Argo buoys and the ocean inhabitants they pass through without seeing. Each sculpture blends marine morphologies derived from species found at different depths with the geometry of scientific instruments. Machine and life merge, reflecting the unsettling diversity of still unexplored ecosystems.

Entangled Others uses generative AI as a tool, not as a co-creator

The Entangled Others process is constructed through conceptual frameworks that determine rules, datasets, aesthetic criteria, and algorithmic approaches. Machine learning distills essential visual patterns from data, translating phenomena that remain inaccessible to human senses due to scale, distance, or complexity into a perceptible form. Computational tools allow us to explore the configurations that emerge from the intertwining of artistic concepts, technical constraints, and natural phenomena: a rigorous process where serendipity operates through methodical trial and error, rather than uncontrolled chance.

Liquid Strata starts from the study of marine snow, the continuous fall of organic particles in the oceans, a process essential for carbon sequestration but almost impossible to observe directly. The work translates this condition into an installation that combines a-life simulations (computational simulations that reproduce the behaviors and processes of living systems), microscopic images, and fragmentary scientific data, offering an experiential perspective on the twilight zone of the ocean between 200 and 1000 meters deep, where sunlight penetrates weakly (the mesopelagic zone). The sound composition, based on the sonification of data, makes perceptible what normally remains beyond the reach of the senses.

The ocean as a model of knowledge

In Sediment Nodes, the focus shifts to sediment suspended in water. Generally associated with turbidity, sediment is explored as a complex ecosystem: particles of silt, clay, and sand become surfaces for algae, bacteria, and microorganisms to aggregate. The work reveals how light, color, and optical diffusion generate rich and unstable perceptual environments that are normally invisible.

Decohering Delineation intertwines neural networks and ocean data through computational processes inspired by quantum computing. The work makes visible how events that expand over time escape immediate perception, exploring the interconnection between different time scales. Fluid configurations emerge where the mutual influence between organisms, events, and digital systems becomes perceptible.

The ocean emerges as an epistemic model: a complex organism that reminds us that knowledge is always partial, situated, and never completely under control. Where data is lacking, creative opportunities emerge: speculative scenarios, organisms, and life forms that expand what we can imagine about the world.