Ocean Drifters, Tyler Moorehead & Lucy Papadopoulos, 2019 - 2022.

Ocean Drifters is a live sound experience that uses sonic composition, real-time sound capture and embodied learning to stimulate human empathy with life at a microscopic scale.

Inspired by indigenous philosophy, Ocean Drifters is a provocation and a collective meditation that aims to place empathy at the centre of ecology to reconnect us to the waters from which we emerged and still need to survive.

Ocean Drifters aims to use the transcendence of felt experience to rekindle human relationship to underwater primordial life.

Tens of thousands of marine creatures drift our ocean waves to feed and to breed. Many of these are the microscopic plankton that make up 90% of all marine life, and which form the foundation of our ecosystem.

Sonic submersion invites participants to temporarily recapture their place within the infinite ambiguity of the ancient ocean. 

Ocean Drifters opens a speculative enquiry into the serious question of human impacts on marine organisms’ ocean drifting way of life. The soundscape accompanies abstract marine scapes and uses an array of analog and digital sounds, including the sound of air guns and found materials in the sea, to convey the distortion of sound in ocean water. 

As part of this speculation, the reflective phase of Ocean Drifters asks visitors to respect intuitive forms of knowledge, trusting their own experience of physical vibration and sound as one valid form of understanding.

Showcased at IRCAM, Paris, 2020 and included in ‘Design in an age of crisis’ selection at London Design Biennale 2021 .

AUDIO: Listen to an Ocean Drifters Sample soundscape.