Giant Whisper

Multi-layered Sonic Landscape

Giant Whisper (Image 1 ~ 4)
Realtime Graphic Simulation, Projector, Multi-channel Audio System, Realtime Vessel Tracking Software System, PC, Tablet PC

Terrain (Image 5 ~ 6)
Print, Vessel Tracking Data

Fading Scene (Image 7 ~ 11)
Print, Spectrogram of Marine Animal Sound

Moby Dick (Image 12 ~ 13)
Realtime Audio Visualization, PC, Monitor

2022
Marine Animals rely heavily on sound for their everyday lives, including hunting, echolocation, communication, etc. If our previous work <Big Dreams> (2021) focused on creating a transformational experience of senses from visual to aural, expands this exploration to the multi-layered landscape of the ocean. Ocean had been a medium for sonic transactions for marine animals until the involvement of human society, and the disruption of the ocean ecosystem due to noise pollution, which is the main motif of this ongoing collaboration, implies a deeper relationship between the society, ecology, and technology. Ocean vessels and various detection technologies, which have been involved in human outreach to the ocean, are parallel with the expansion of exchange and capitalism, and the development of cybernetics that was parallel with the military.

<Giant Whisper> attempts to show the ocean as this multi-layered space through an art exhibition format. At the corridor right next to the main entrance, prints of spectrograms from marine animals and vessels are displayed. In the main gallery, the visuals are generated based on the number of vessels at a certain location on the ocean in realtime. The audience can move around the ocean using the tablet PC at the center of the gallery. The audio of marine animals is spatialized, and the source position is located in the direction where there are the least amount of vessels. Also, the audio gets filtered based on the number and types of vessels that are present on that spot. The more vessels are present, the quieter the marine animal sound becomes. In the sub-gallery, the spectrogram of the audio from the main gallery is visualized and the print of a heatmap that shows the vessel position data is displayed.

Through this, the exhibition places the ocean as a multi-layered space of marine life, sound, vessel, information technology, and capitalism, while describing human activity in the form of silence. By transforming the sensory experience through silence and the aural, this work affords the audience to listen to the ocean from a different perspective by questioning the current relationship we have with the deep sea and suggests a new way of "unexpected collaboration and combination"¹ with it.