In October, 2021, as part of the Artists for Plants exhibition in Chocó Colombia aiming to bring awareness to challenges that the communities there are facing, I developed an audiovisual representation of ship traffic interfering with humpback whale conversations.

Humpback Whale Acoustic Recordings from the Gulf of Tribugá (collected by Macauáticos Colombia Foundation and the PHySIC Project) - TouchDesigner / Ableton (4K / 60 FPS)

Shared humpback whale acoustic recordings from the Gulf of Tribugá were collected by Macauáticos Colombia Foundation and the PHySIC Project.

This piece uses TouchDesigner with components and techniques adapted by Greg Hermanovic (GraphPlot) and Paketa12 (recursive displacement)

There are conversations beneath the waves of the Gulf of Tribugá and anthropogenic activity is interfering.

Ships produce up to 190 db of noise at surface level and their effects on marine life have been documented. Developers have pushed a proposal for the construction of a port in Tribugá Bay, which would drastically increase ship traffic in the gulf.

This piece is a spectrographic representation of the potential interference of increased ship traffic in the Gulf of Tribugá. As time goes on, the quality of the humpback whale spectrographic data is reduced through the increase in noise.