Fish Phone Booth – La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival 2024

This collaboration with Birch Aquarium will unfold and build through different phases over the next year. For this first prototype at WOW, a small booth is transformed into a listening device where participants encounter ocean life at a 1:1 scale through a sensory experience of sound and touch. The audience can explore the undersea world, tuning in to signals within the natural and human-made ocean soundscape and responding with their vocalizations. Viewer choices shape the evolving sound mix, like a monitoring station or deep sea observatory. Outside the booth, people’s movements are tracked through the room, accumulating visual trails that echo the migratory patterns of sea life. This project brings research from ocean observation and the internet of animals to life, translating data from outside the limits of human perception into bodily and sonic experiences.

https://lajollaplayhouse.org/wowfestival/event/fish-phone-booth-playtest

Interspecies Communication Theater – ASU Worlds in Play 2024

Interspecies Communication Theater is a geospatial interactive audio and storytelling project in development with the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Without Walls at the La Jolla Playhouse. We are working with scientists, data, and machine learning (AI) to engage the public with ocean acoustics, a broad field focused on studying sound, its propagation, and behavior underwater. Akin to sound channels occurring underwater, we are experimenting with an always-on audio-driven sonic experience that uses sounds from a kelp forest to marine life—which, at times, use smell, sight, and touch as cues, their most effective mode of communication is through acoustic cues, or sound – both vocal and non-vocal. Like using a hydrophone underwater, the audience may tune in to different listening posts throughout the aquarium. Voice interaction could allow players to choose narrative flows and soundscapes. This layered, participatory audio structure echoes the hydroacoustic ecology of the ocean itself. It aims to engage the public in a deep understanding of oceanographic research, potentially informing interspecies design—a multi-perspective design approach.

https://worldsinplay.com/Robert-Twomey-and-Ash-Eliza-Smith