Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling

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"Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling" is a collaboration between visual artist Stephanie Rothenberg and sound artist Suzanne Thorpe. The artwork is a speculative operetta focused on the listening body of the heroic oyster. A water filter, sea level mitigator and food source, the oyster is a vital member of our ecosystem that knows habitats for settlement by sensing sound. Specifically, research conducted at North Carolina State University’s Department of Marine, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences found that the bottom-dwelling oyster knows suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. For oysters, sound is a more reliable indicator than chemical exudates or patterns of light. Building on soundscape studies that feature the listening body as an onto-epistemological site, the project leverages data of harbor port movement and local sound to query the dynamic relationships between human activity and the wellbeing of oysters. The project will express thematic content through an immersive sound, visual and sculpted environment, and by virtual and in-person means, dependent on exhibition and performance opportunities. Through the simulated sense of this sonically navigating being, and participatory and responsive engagement mechanisms, we will animate questions such as: how do we listen for safe harbors, and what do they sound like; how do we tend to the more-than-human-world and how does it tend to us? And can the listening oyster guide us to a politics of mutual tending?

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