BENTHOS PEOPLE

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We can assume that the beings in the benthos have ‘experience’. They sense the world around them, move, communicate, feel pain, have dreams or hallucinations, perhaps possess desires, or encounter different mental states and have experience. As a way to get close to this experience, I find people who study such ecologies - scientists - as mediums in themselves. Science as a method, needs to distance the scientist from her subjectivity. I am interested in these subjective encounters between the scientist and her subject of study.


‘Benthos’ refers to the community of organisms or aquatic beings that live on or in the bottom sediments of the sea or river. In putting ‘benthos’ together with ‘people’, I invite the human listener to contemplate the experience of life in the Benthos variously relating to this environment.


Our sensory abilities allow us to observe only a slice of the world, such as a narrow band of light, or a narrow band of sonic energy. An individual brain evolved through generations and through our lives, can produce our very individual experiences. How do we know more than that can be thought or felt?  Meanings accumulate with time. As one sits on the edge of trying to ‘be’ another, one needs to empty oneself of the desire of ‘knowing’ or creating  ‘meaning,’ because our knowledges and meaning makings are deeply contaminated with being human.


Vardhan as a scientist has researched corals and marine life in the Andaman and Nicobar region over the course of 15 years. His closeness with the corals is subjective, while his research is an objective investigation of phenomenon. In this tension lies the key to seeing differently and seeing more. Here I have used recordings made using a hydrophone to reproduce the unknowable landscape of the benthos. Using these recordings, the narration of one of his dives, and the pioneering early twentieth century hand painted collaborative maps of Marie Tharp (geologist and oceanographic cartographer) and Berann (geologist), I have tried to allude to this more-than-human experience.