Beta Space: Patty Chang and David Kelley

Beta Space: Patty Chang and David Kelley premieres a multimedia exploration of the dynamic entanglements among humans, animals, minerals, and machines. Using deep-sea mining as a point of departure, Patty Chang and David Kelley’s project encourages us to think expansively and critically about the loops—of scientific discovery, resource extraction, and technological development—that connect us with places uninhabited by humans.

Chang and Kelley’s project holds together these loops to facilitate a broad conversation about how we relate to such sites as we navigate multiple climate crises.

Drawing on the forms of shipwrecks and whale falls, the artists’ multimedia installation weaves together footage and objects related to the International Seabed Authority’s recent and ongoing convenings in Kingston, Jamaica; the HMS Challenger collections at natural history museums in London and Oxford; and scientific specimens from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Through its filmed sequences and 3-D animations, this video brings together the multiple time scales of the deep sea: the millions of years it took for organic matter like shark teeth and whale bones to become nodules of rare minerals critical for the deep sea’s biodiversity; 150 years of modern oceanography, initiated by the 1872 expedition of the HMS Challenger, which discovered the mineral trove in the Pacific Ocean;

30 years of legislative efforts by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to permit commercial mining along the ocean floor; and the immediate climate crisis.

Featuring deep-sea specimens from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the seven glass and ceramic “Chakra Sculptures” make visible the more-than-human ecologies and time scales of the deep sea. Loosely referencing the seven-chakra system—which maps energy focal points on the human body to aid in meditation practices—the sculptures present various combinations of animal and mineral specimens to reimagine their past entanglements in the deep sea and speculate on their future lives.

What other loops might the ocean weave between the planet’s living and nonliving matter, and what roles will we play in these relationships?

The video is synchronized with a score produced by composer Yasna Vismale featuring Jamaican musician and singer Bongo Herman. It also highlights the drummers from the historic Charles Town Maroon community of Buff Bay, Jamaica, and a chant from native Hawaiian environmental activist and elder Solomon “Uncle Sol” Pili Kaho‘ohalahala.

These sonic elements elaborate a genealogy of resistance against extractive systems—such as slavery, settler colonialism, and plantation economies—and foreground the human and more-than-human perspectives overlooked by the ISA’s legislative proceedings. In this work, Chang and Kelley propose other ways to live in relation to the ocean, “seeping and sealing, living and non-living together.”