Deep Minds

Deep Minds is an expression of wonder, respect, and humility before the ocean as a living system—which exceeds our categories, and defies our attempts to define bodies and minds.

Our inspiration comes from our connection to the ocean, and we developed the concepts over long walks by the sea near our home in California. We recorded the dance in our studio. We then worked with stills from OceanX footage of ocean, siphonophores, jellyfish and nautilus, and developed the project during a residency at Pioneerworks, Brooklyn.

Look at the ocean, and look at your hand: these are two bodies of water.

Every core function of our biology was coded underwater. We crawled onto land, but we brought the ocean with us.

We can intellectually recognize this, but how can we feel it, in our body?

We use dance to help us re-embody this kind of thinking. The movement is driven by a human dancer—our attempts to understand these different minds through the lens of our bodies and minds, and the potential to expand our definition of what mind can be, even beyond the boundaries of the individual, even beyond the categories of biological life.

When we use dance, we're drawing on the cognitive phenomenon of embodied simulation—when you see movement you feel it as if it's happening in your own body.

But our minds also extend beyond our bodies: into the environment, the ocean, the stars. When we alter the ecosystems with which we have evolved, we alter ourselves.

This leads to another question: in our quest to optimize our experience, are we actually diminishing our minds? Even our consciousness?

It is part of a broader exploration of what our technologically mediated culture has severed us from, and what happens when the abstractions we use to make the world legible are mistaken for reality itself.

We live in a promiscuous, many-sensory cosmos in which cells, organisms, communities, atmospheres, and planetary cycles continuously shape one another. It is a universe filled with communication. Most of this communication is not meant for us, and will never become legible to us—yet our bodies and minds remain participants in and consequences of those exchanges.

And it affects us in ways far beyond what our simple models can comprehend and far beyond the reach of machine metaphors and computational frameworks.

We hope to bring the audience on this journey with us, to remember that we are all bodies of water.