katherine behar
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Title: Maritime Messaging: Red Hook
Media: Public performance on NYC Ferry boats with video, hydrophone recordings, poems generated by artificial intelligence, text-to-speech software, performers, sound installation, weather; 8 hours and 30 minutes
Year: 2017.
Exhibited: October 29, 2017. Solo exhibition and public art performance, co-produced by Pioneer Works and PortSide NewYork. Performances onboard NYC Ferry boats with sound installation onboard the Mary A Whalen oil tanker. Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Credits:

Technologist and Programmer: Silvia Ruzanka
Project Manager: Bethany Tabor
Photography: Christine Dalenta (Images 1, 2, 3, 4, 6), Ashika Kuruvilla (Image 4), Pinar Yolocan (Images 10, 11), Tyra Bombetto (Image 12)

Maritime Messaging: Red Hook is produced in collaboration with PortSide NewYork and Pioneer Works.

PortSide supplied the content of their e-museum and community guide at www.Red HookWaterStories.org as source material for the neural network to study.

Pioneer Works hosted Katherine Behar as a Technology Resident while she developed this project.

Maritime Messaging received support from The MacDowell Colony.

Technology for Maritime Messaging is provided by Baruch College.

art: Maritime Messaging: Red Hook
click to enlarge:
Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar
Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar Maritime Messaging: Red Hook - Katherine Behar

Documentation video with excerpts:

Statement

What if water is a witness? Surrounding Brooklyn, and neighborhoods like Red Hook, water remains a constant in a rapidly changing borough. Human history fluctuates over time, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, booming and busting. What if water has absorbed it all?

In Maritime Messaging: Red Hook, artist Katherine Behar trained an artificial intelligence on the history of Red Hook in order to help the water to tell its story. Using underwater sound recordings, Maritime Messaging staged a mock conversation between the water of Red Hook and a digital assistant app that invited the water to send messages and translated its gurgles into words. The resulting phrases were generated by an artificial neural network, a form of artificial intelligence. The poetic outcome suggests a mysterious glimpse into the water's muddled memories of Red Hook's maritime past.

Description

On October 29, 2017, to commemorate the five-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, fifteen performers journeyed from Wall Street to Red Hook on NYC Ferry boats. Standing as witnesses, they listened to the water and used iPads to broadcast its conversation. An unannounced performer, Tropical Storm Phillipe, made a guest appearance during the performance. Upstaging its human counterparts, Phillipe recalled the ghost of Sandy and underscored water's vital impact.

The historic oil tanker the MARY A. WHALEN, home of PortSide NewYork, presented a sound installation with the gurgling ocean and AI's conversation reverberating through its metallic hull.