A concept sketch of a HOLOSCENES aquarium. Image: Peter Zuspan / Lars Jan

TED Fellow Lars Jan, the director of the multi-disciplinary art lab Early Morning Opera, is seeking everyday personal rituals from collaborators — perhaps, you? — for a work-in-progress called HOLOSCENES. This public-performance installation — inspired by humanity’s relationship with climate change and flooding — will be made up of three aquariums, each enclosing a performer enacting a looped, choreographed ritual as water rises and falls driven by environmental data drawn from the internet.

Would you like to contribute? Read on.

Can you give us an example of the kinds of rituals you’re collecting?

We had a collaborator on the border of Myanmar who met a family and documented a daily face-painting ritual. It’s for beautification, but it also acts as a sunblock. It involves a kind of wood called thanaka, which is ground on a particular kind of stone with a little bit of water to form a paste, which is applied on the face. This ritual is mostly done by women, who also apply it to their children, often in beautiful patterns. This particular woman used a toothbrush to apply it every morning. That’s the thing that’s important — the ritual might be something that happens in hundreds of thousands of households, but the point of the project is not to recreate the ritual in a generic fashion. We’re making contact with very specific individuals who perform their own ritual in a very specific way. I make coffee in the morning like a lot of people, but I also have my own idiosyncrasies — a personal pattern to this daily ritual that is all my own.

Will the rituals you’re collecting form the basis of the performances inside the aquariums?

Yes. The choreography and design of the physical behaviors inside the aquariums are all sourced from people we make contact with who live near any one of the 52 coordinates that we generated randomly across the globe. Our performers simulate these rituals inside the aquariums based on documentation collected by collaborators. Sometimes the people we’re contacting are far away – I’m communicating with people who are, say, in Uganda, having been handed from one interested person to another to another to reach people who are close to a coordinate and want to collaborate with us. What I wanted to do was to create a semi-open source network, dependent on an unpredictable cascade of online and in-person encounters.

A rendering of what HOLOSCENES will look like when staged. Credit: Peter Zuspan

Will the contributors get to participate in performances?

Yes, by providing the source material for the choreography and design at the heart of the project.
The entire collection process is actually referencing 500 years of what could be called a colonialist collection process, starting with imperial menageries, cabinets of wonder or curiosity, down to zoos and world’s fairs and aquariums. And we want to depriortize catastrophe as a lens through which to look at the world.

The project is inspired by flooding. In the last decade, I’ve found myself looking at a lot of places I had never seen before, and the reason I was looking at them, by way of beautiful photographs online and in newspapers, was because they were devastated. I wanted to find a more democratic way to look at the planet and the people on it. Rather than highlight people at the extremes, at their lowest, I wanted to cultivate and collect the mundane — and sacred — everyday behaviors of people across the planet.

How do the rituals then relate to climate change and flooding?

That’s partly where the conceptual and aesthetic leap is. Ultimately, the project is putting the rhythms of daily behaviors and human-scale patterns in conversation with longer-term patterns, such as those driving climate change. That’s a question at the heart of the project: What’s the future of long-term thinking? Are we, as individuals, communities, and a global society, capable of evolution in terms of recognizing complex, long-term patterns and then adapting our everyday behaviors based on that rational understanding?

The aquariums flood and drain with water at varying speeds. What drives the hydraulic system to make water going up and down in the tanks is environmental data scraped from the internet and other sources. Sometimes it floods incredibly slowly, sometimes very quickly. It’s a material data visualization: the water level goes up and down, but rather than seeing it from a remove, the data driving the water movement flooding and draining is dramatically affecting the ritual being performed, and dramatically changing the environment of the person in the tank. I’m curious to see the visceral empathic response viewers will have seeing the water flooding and draining, flooding and draining while a person — a performer — copes with the very mythic yet increasingly present-tense condition of deluge.

This visceral, visual metaphor — a person fighting through flood in an aquariam — is partly about our collective myopia in the face of these changes and our persistence and adaptive capacities in response to our changing environment — a multi pronged, complex visual metaphor that radiates out and connects with all kinds research and thinking, from behavioral science, climate science and palaeontology to questions like “What’s the neurology of long-term thinking? What’s the evolutionary future of empathy in an increasingly mediated world?” All those things are woven together in the project.

Where will HOLOSCENES be performed?

The full public, three-aquarium iteration of HOLOSCENES will premiere at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco in 2015, and likely premiere in a one-aquarium iteration sometime in 2014. Ultimately, it is meant to be a public performance intervention in an urban environment, running 24-hours a day for 7 days. The intention is to become a pivot for a public discourse and awareness outside of an exclusively artistic context. My collaborators and I are interested in reaching a far broader audience.

To find out more and contribute a ritual to be considered for HOLOSCENES, visit the website »

“An extended illness had changed the way I could access the world … I’d seen my life slip away and become restricted,” explains Austin in today’s talk, which was given at TEDxWomen in December. “When I started using the wheelchair 16 years ago, it was a tremendous new freedom … I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.”

And yet, Austin noticed that people started treating her very differently.

“It was as if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended,” says Austin. “They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like ‘limitation,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pity’ and ‘restriction.’ … I knew that I needed to make my own stories about this experience.”

In today’s jaw-dropping talk, Austin explores how the divide between the way she sees herself and the way others see her inspires her art, which challenges the traditional notion of disability and shares the joy she feels experiencing the world from her chair.

One of Austin’s first series in this vein was called “Traces from a Wheelchair,” created in 2009. For the work, Austin used paint on the wheels of her chair to create glorious loops — both on enormous sheets of paper and on the grass outside the gallery showing the exhibit.

“The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with,” explains Austin. “It was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives.”

Austin went on to found Freewheeling, an initiative to expand the bounds of Disability Arts with fellow creators Jack Morris and Shirley Phillips. The group soon staged the three-part installation “Freewheeling: An Absent Presence or a Present Absence,” also in 2009, bringing the same concept to the streets of the town of Plymouth.

While many loved the installation, though, some locals saw the exhibit as graffiti — leading the BBC to cover the exhibit. “Some people may see it as vandalism,” Austin says defending her work. “But it’s the thought and concept that makes it artwork.”

Next, Austin had a crazy idea: to use her wheelchair to explore underwater. In 2010, with a grant from the Arts Council England’s Impact program, she began building an underwater wheelchair for a work she called “Testing the Water.”

“I realized that scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way that a wheelchair does,” explains Austin in today’s talk. “But the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure — completely different to people’s responses to the wheelchair. So I thought, ‘I wonder what will happen if I put the two together?’”

“When we started talking to people about it, engineers were saying it wouldn’t work, the wheelchair would go into a spin, it was not designed to go through water — but I was sure it would,” Austin told the BBC of the chair. “If you just put a thruster under the chair all the thrust is below the center of gravity so you rotate. It was certainly much more acrobatic than I anticipated.”

Austin had hugely ambitious plans for her underwater wheelchair. She applied to be part of the Cultural Olympiad, the art extravaganza surrounding the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. The plan: to take the underwater wheelchair to the ocean.

The incredible work above, which Austin called “Creating the Spectacle,” not only required months of intense physical training — it also necessitated a creative and technical team. Trish Wheatley, co-producer, shares in a blog post that the crew headed to Egypt to film Austin exploring the Red Sea in her wheelchair. The location gave the tropical backdrop and marine life that make this video so magical. And, because the water was warmer, Austin could dress in everyday clothing. The video took six days of filming, Austin going under for multiple 20-minute dives.

“Creating the Spectacle” was performed on August 29. For it, a swimming pool was transformed into an unconventional stage, with 23 scuba-equipped spectators (several of them disabled) going underwater to watch Austin dive in live. The performance was synthesized with the footage of Austin in the Red Sea and with the video above, called “Finding the Flame,” which shows Austin discovering the Paralympic torch in a cave

We can’t wait to see where Austin’s wheelchair will take her next. We place bets on: the sky.