Shoreline: Designing Marine Interventions Through Nonhuman Agency

Shoreline is an intervention that restitutes the space taken by human caused dead zones in the Baltic Sea. Native coastal clay is vitrified to create buoyant platforms which are suspended above the oxygen deprived seafloor. The platforms give ground space to seaweeds and seafloor-dwelling creatures which are imperative to the local ecosystem. To passively observe this ecological culture change, Shoreline employs a hydrophone to record a continuous full spectrum soundscape. The resulting audio spectrogram contains audio patterns of the ecosystem’s constituent organisms. Using patterns from isolated recordings, these organisms can be identified on Shoreline’s ongoing spectrogram. Changes in these patterns, their frequency, and their volume describe how the ecosystem develops.