A Voice Becomes a Mirror Plane Becomes Holohedral Wand

A voice becomes a mirror plane becomes a holohedral wand is a speculative fiction about the extraction of minerals in the deep sea. Narrated by a not-quite-human character, it tells the story of a deadening ocean, and the adventures of this shapeshifting being amidst the increased desperation to maintain the structures of life under capitalism. Full of grief and love for an ocean once known intimately and whose very colors have changed due to global warming, the character transforms beyond gender and human form to evolve as a symbiont with other life forms such as microorganisms with an appetite for stones. Could this inhuman appetite invite small forms of sabotage against extractivism?

The accompanying soundscape composed by Samuel Hertz immerses the listener in an oceanic underworld that has become the site of deep-sea mining, with recordings of low-frequency tones emanating from hydrothermal vents [1] and impulse responses generated by sounding signals to resonate within 3D models of mineral crystallographies. [2] The artwork was originally commissioned in 2021 by Radio Amnion as a sound work to be played for the ocean itself during the full moon, transmitted through a nodule of a submerged neutrino telescope that searches for dark matter. The telescope lies two kilometers deep inside a fault of the Pacific Ocean in the Cascadia Basin.

[1] Samples recorded by T. Crone, et al, “The Sound Generated by Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker Hydrothermal Vents,” Plos One (2006).

[2] 3D models were produced thanks to M. Aristov using VESTA: K. Momma and F. Izumi, “VESTA 3 for three-dimensional visualization of crystal, volumetric and morphology data,” J. Appl. Crystallogr., 44, 1272-1276 (2011).