The time that I spent on R/V Falkor was filled with first experiences: sleeping on a ship, watching sonar mapping take place in real time, dancing in a dark garage, being seasick, and finding a way to do a site-specific performance in a venue that I never imagined.
Data and Design
After finding my sea legs, I was able to see firsthand how science is conducted on R/V Falkor. While I had been in a few university science research labs, conducting experiments on dry land as opposed to working on a moving ship requires a perspective of continuous motion. Subtle details of daily life doing research on a ship requires thinking about, such as how and where you put down your pen to avoid having to scramble on all fours looking for it when an eventual wave rocks the boat a little more than usual. The motion of the ship is something that the scientists who set up the sonar mapping equipment were thinking about as they designed a gondola
In the past two years, I have worked to create a system of wearable LEDs run by a raspberryPi
Staging for the Crew
But I also wanted to do something live for those onboard. I did not realize at first that I would have most areas of the ship as an option. We settled on the aft deck as the performance location, projecting onto the garage as the ship continued capturing mapping data. At dusk, on a cloudy evening, I put myself into perpetual motion and drew with light using the mapping data that was being collected as sound. It was a very surreal experience to use the deck to perform on as the sea rolled by on three sides of me. I was able to capture some 360 videos of it before inviting the other artists out to see the performance as the evening grew darker. It will be quite some time before a site as unique as the Falkor comes my way to perform on.
Check out a quick video showing Lori Performing on R/V Falkor below:
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