Marsh Temporalities (2025)

In-Progress Work

This project will be exhibited in Spring 2025.

Marsh Temporalities is an audiovisual installation that combines microscopy-based visuals with a soundscape of biorhythmic recordings from salt marsh ecologies throughout New York City.

This is an audio test created from site-specific hydrophone and geophone recordings at Marine Park Salt Marsh in Brooklyn, NY.

Hydrophones are waterproof microphones that can be caused to record water-based ecologies by amplifying underwater sounds that we cannot hear from above the surface of the water. And since sound travels very differently in water than it does in air, even familiar sounds are newly heard and understood through the hydrophone recordings. Geophones record land-based ecologies through seismic vibrations. These recordings are best taken from porous parts of the earth that have lots of movement in and around them (in this case, an ant hill in the sandy earth around the marsh).

This is a video test that features hydrophone recordings from the pond at The Hammond Museum in North Salem, NY. The visuals in the piece are a blend of footage of the pond’s surface, and microscope footage of a sample from the pond water. Sound-contributors through the hydrophone recording include: Green Frog/Lithobates clamitans, American Bluet Damselfly/Enallagma spp., Spiral Pondweed/Potamogeton dimorphus and White Water Lily/Nymphaea odorata, among others, and the sample from the pond water microscope footage centrally features a diatom.