Turbulent Rot

Four-channel live audio performance with responsive video
4K, color, sound; 45 minutes

video

Performance at Haus der Kunst, Munich (DE) commissioned by Radio Amnion
Photo: Ilinca Fechete

Four-channel live audio performance with responsive video
4K, color, sound; 45 minutes

I grasped emptied sea creatures’ bodies with a prehensile desire because, like any primordial being, I was a child who appreciated beauty: the striations of multicolored rings, the iridescences, the gradients of pigment hazing the edge of an interior unseen and inaccessible—except by breaking.

The deep sea is both a medium for sound and a planetary stratum—the closest to the earth’s mantle. In this shifting zone, where tectonic plates fracture and the earth reshapes itself, sediments, clouds and underwater mountains carry the echoes of countless beings and layered histories.

Turbulent Rot (2025) is a collaborative performance by Caitlin Berrigan and Samuel Hertz that listens into these resonant depths. Through text and spatialized sound, the artists summon the voices of deep-sea creatures, currents, and matter both living and non-living. These voices emerge, converge, converse and dissolve again into aquatic foam.

A sonic and poetic composition, the performance offers a sensorial passage into underwater worlds where geology, ecology and memory coalesce in vibration and reverberation.

Acknowledgments

Commissioned by Jol Thoms for Radio Amnion

https://radioamnion.net

Credits

Sound composition, programming: Samuel Hertz
Video, text, vocals: Caitlin Berrigan

2025

Turbulent Rot

Acknowledgments

Credits

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