Glow Glint Glister

Submarine colonization

Incorporating Jellies

Jellyfish Burger
3D Digital Composite, 2009

I [Dave Beck] worked with a marine scientist, Jennifer Jacquet, to create this digital piece. You can find the inspiration for this collaboration, along with other information about her research, on her blog. Received an award from the NSF and featured in Science Featured in the New York Times and National Geographic

Written on the napkin in the above image:
"Overfishing has reduced jellyfish predators and climate change has increased oceans temperatures.  Jellies thrive in empty, warmer oceans. Without changes in global fishing policies, the seafood of the future is rubbery--the jellyfish burger is so close to becoming a reality, we can taste it..."

H.D. on Jellyfish Consciousness

In her Notes on Thought and Vision, Hilda Doolittle describes a higher level of consciousness and erotic creativity through the figure of a jellyfish. The image she gives is of a jellyfish sitting on her head with feelers extending into the world and connecting with the world. Jellyfish consciousness was a way of perceiving through gendered, embodied experiences.

Jellyfish becoming (with) Limaceous

Liminal Life

"A gelatinous, nearly transparent sea creature that resembles a jelly fish and a slug, known as a salp. The creatures have what appear to be green horns at one end and rows of muscles at the other end."

"Salps move through the ocean by contracting, thereby pumping water through their gelatinous bodies. The slimy creatures strain the pumped water through its internal feeding filters, feeding on phytoplankton in the process."

SFAI next Thursday

I'm looking forward to visiting Martha Kenney's Poetics and Politics of Biology class next week. I'm excited to ask, how does light function in your practice?

How do you illuminate your practice, manipulate or inhabit light as part of your creative process?

Snorkeling with jellies

More gelata

Rabbit Light

Stinging Sounds

With nerve nets (a nervous system) located in epidermal tissue, jellyfish do not “hear” sound, but they touch and are touched by vibrations through their nerve rings (rhopalial lappets). Their bodies are touch-webs or nets of touch. Indeed, their bodies do not just have touch; they are touch. Jellyfish are living, respiring, metamorphosing tactile systems – their morphology – its diffuse nervous systems, its very structure and form – entails the touching system that it is.

                                     Pauline Oliveros

Pulsing, undulating, and touching jellyfish have found route into music – such as the searing, reverberating, polyvocal sounds of deep-listening crusader Pauline Oliveros’s Primordial Lift, a 1999 recording dedicated to jellyfish. The trance-like movements of medusea have shaped John Huling’s “Jelly Music” and “Lost Ocean,” compositions that waver, murmur and bubble, suggesting ceaseless flux, resonance, and immersion.  Andy Laster’s narrative jazz work “jellyfish,” which is cynical and mythological, offers some physical engagement with jellyfish. Composer Erik Satie’s lyrical comedy “The Sting of theJellyfish” and Yo La Tengo’s homage to filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s film “How Some Jellyfish Are Born” both play with the figural and the literal jellyfish.

Jelly Music

    

"How Some Jellyfish are Born" 

SomaLuminal

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights
Risking enchantment.

T.S. Eliot 

 Transgenic animals are hybridized subject-objects and, as such, destabilize notions of purity and authenticity that emerge in discussions of living animals, especially when we consider taxonomic classifications. Transgenics are like membranes. They leak. Transgenic animals belong to fields of different differences. They come from elsewhere. Nomads: they prefer “to travel” rather than “to dwell.”


Soma (as in Body) + Lumen: Latin for light: light, lantern, lamp, but also clearity and understanding. Lumen is also light of day, as well as a unit of luminous flux, the amount of visible light emitted from a source. But Lumen is also “the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell.” Lumen: in
nematodes, an esophagus; in fungi, the space bounded by tissue, the central cavity of the cell.