Selkie

A camera trained on a fish tank of foraged seaweed became both the image and the soundtrack of the room. The tiny, swaying world was filmed live and projected large, so small gestures — a frond uncurling, light refracting through water — filled the whole space as sound and picture at once. We also projected words and images into the tank: light bends through water, glass and seaweed, so a line of text arrives broken, doubled and rippling — a way of asking what creative captioning could be inside the image itself.

Here we are playing with me being inside the image: first looking down on the world from above, the giant looking into a small sea, and then dropping the camera to submerse into the water at eye level, so the audience is in it rather than over it.

Refraction does the work: the tank splits the projector's light into grids, spectra and shadows that fall on the floor and the walls as well as the water. Text caught in that becomes weather — a word swimming, a sentence pulled apart by a frond moving in front of it.

For access this matters. Creative captioning could be projected into the tank and scaled up with the rest of the micro-cinema, so captions are part of the image the whole audience is watching rather than an add-on beside it.

Thomas Buckley built a TouchDesigner workflow that tracks a hand in real time and projects that movement straight into the micro-cinema tank. The performer is no longer in front of the light — they are puppeteering the light itself, shaping the seaweed world with a gesture.

One of the most exciting discoveries of the week. A tiny filmed clip of the performer was projected into the tank, and we played with it merging into a seal — the filmed body dissolving into a swimming animal through cloudy water and gauze. The human figure and the seal read as one creature, the boundary between them softening until the skin was neither. Out of that play a single image arrived: a 'seal's eye view' — looking up through the water at the world above the surface, the earlier micro-cinema re-seen from inside the tank. Scale collapsed: the tiny became the vast, the vast became the close.

A microscope camera turned the smallest things in the room into a whole landscape: seaweed, sand, tissue-paper skin. We tested ultra-small scale live — magnifying a surface until it read as a coastline — and played with tearing tissue skin away, then laying that magnified world over the landmarks of a body: a wrist, a spine, the back of a hand. Remembering your skin, at the size of a grain of sand.

Remembering how to swim — the weightless body carried now inside a human body of weight. We worked on the transform: what are feet, what are legs, when the body is no longer walking land? Gauze wrapped the body and caught the projection, so movement and light became one skin. (Clips are short cuttings from longer takes.)

We explored shadow movements in the body as a kind of remembering, and looked hard at a seal on land: heavy, cumbersome, not elegant — hauling rather than gliding. Feet became the question. What are they, what does it mean to put your weight there, and how do seal movements and behaviours read when they arrive in a human body.

An overhead projector threw a hard light through wet tissue paper, and the tissue became skin — a silhouette pressed against it, peeling away. We were exploring transformation: the gruesome, grotesque moment a body sheds what it wears. There is flesh in this piece, and some of it is horrid to see — an echo of the microscope work. Your skin, and what is that.

The skin was made from wet tissue paper laid across the OHP lens, lit from behind so the figure behind it read only as a dark shape — anonymous, almost a seal — until it began to tear the paper away. The peeling is the transformation: not a clean reveal but a shedding, wet and slow, the tissue clinging and ripping like something that was once alive.

Tissue paper was laid on the skin wet and then peeled off in shadow — and it looked great.

It isn't a seal — it's a projection-mapped puppet, and the images running across it are recordings of a real seal. Film is laid onto the object so the puppet carries the animal as a memory on its surface, skin flickering between flesh, film and water. That sent us into seal behaviour: how they move, rest, turn, what their habits are, and how much of that can live in a made body.

Tiny scale prototypes — rough figures in different materials, built to find out what the R&D puppets actually needed to be. We played with scale and movability: how small a body can read, what a material lets a joint do, where the puppet breaks. Each test told us something the real puppets would have to solve — weight, articulation, how the figure meets the projection rather than just sitting inside it.

I foraged seaweed from East Head in Sussex and we made the sound of the room out of it — live, from the living plant. The sea diorama in the tank is not a set dressing; it is a living organism playing itself.

The sound is generated with an Instruo Pocket SCÍON, a portable biofeedback instrument. Sensor clips are attached to a living organism and an analogue pulse oscillator tracks the tiny changes in electrical resistance across the plant. Those fluctuations set the frequency of the pulse, and the onboard sound engine turns that data into evolving, five-note polyphonic soundscapes — with MIDI and OSC out, so the plant can drive other instruments and visuals too. The seaweed is quite literally making the music.

This way of generating sound is new to my practice, and it changes what the show is. We would want the audience to see it: the foraging, the clipping, the tank — everything, image and sound, created live in front of them.

An idea we want to keep: collect seaweed local to wherever the piece is performed, so each place gives the show its own voice and its own sea.

We also discovered that some seaweed is UV reactive. We want to test this properly and build a UV sequence — hidden life and hidden worlds revealed, which mirrors exactly what we were exploring all week: what is under the surface, and what it costs to bring it up.

Instruo Pocket SCÍON →