Week Ten
MONDAY
Today was day of Mare’s Mad-Deep Deep Sea Symposium, taking place over two days. The first, today, a series of presentations from researchers at Mare-Madeira and further afield about all things deep sea. The purpose of the symposium was to reflect on the state of, and opportunities for, deep sea research in Madeira and Macronesia.
The Whale Whisperer. 3d printed pla wireless speaker and recharging base. (Evans et al., 2023)
In the afternoon there was a tech showcase and Wave Labs had a table where we demo’d the Whale Whisperer. The reaction was good. Many delegates stopped to pick it up and listen and some came back for a second go. I observed that when prompted, listening was intuitive, but the way we had configured the software - to play one track until replaced on base when it switches on a second pickup, was not effective. People want to listen during one pick up. Some will listen for longer than others, but when the track finishes they replace the earbone and do not re-pick up on that visit unless reprompted. A better configuration would be shorter versions of four different species - say ten seconds each. Currently each file is around 45 seconds and cycles through 1. Blue Whale 2. Humpback Whale 3. Fin Whale 4. Different Blue Whale 5. Sperm Whale.
Next configuration I will try ten secs of Blue, Humpback, Fin and Sperm only. So a forty second file which is about the time appropriate for a demo situation. Alternatively, In a less structured situation such as a fine art exhibition the file could begin like this, for the casual listener, but could potentially extend for a more in depth listening experience if desired. It’s a simple matter to replace the files in the code which is held on a DW (check this next week with Marko).
Mare-Madeira Mad-Deep symposium programme, 18 December, 2023
TUESDAY
The symposium continued with some round table discussions.
WEDNESDAY
I helped Diane set up the Christmas stall at the Mercado do Lavradores. There was mention that the Whale Whisperer might be displayed again, but it was more of a selling/ craft market type situation with little spare space. Diane had made some cool cards - I bought one for the office.
Christmas card by Diane Easton, 2023
João and Francisco were doing some tests on the explosive release system for deep sea camera deployment.
João Pestana and Francisco Silva from Wave Labs, Mare Madeira, test an explosive quick release device.
I had a meeting with Laura to try to figure out whether the problem of resolution in the spectograms of my recordings was an issue with the data or an issue with the spectrogram on Audacity. At first she thought the former, but then when we imported the file (Laura 006) into her viewing software Raven Pro, it really showed great detail. So I’m pleased to know that the recorder is as sensitive as I thought it would be.
There is a free version of her viewer called Raven Lite. She also gave me the spec of the recorder they use, so I can do a tech comparison. And she gave me the spectogram settings that she uses.
Scrawled notes from meeting with Laura Radaelli discussing spectogram viewers, December 2023
Thursday
Just updating blog and joining in Christmas drinks/cakefest! Tomorrow will be road trip.
Friday
Road trip! Had the most amazing trip guided by João who drove one car with me, Clara and Marisa, Dinarte with Francisco and Lilia in another and Sylvia with her dad in a third.
Weeks Eleven and Twelve
In the two working days between Christmas and New Year, and in the week of my return to the UK, I worked with Marko on writing the article for Whale Whisperer while João put together supplementary materials and diagrams describing the electronics and tested battery life.
At my suggestion, we framed the piece as a technopoetic work, with reference critical posthumanism. We also draw on Madeira’s history of human/whale interaction over the last eighty years or so. Marko has previously written about this in relation to whale watching tourism, and we extend this to situate the piece on a timeline beginning with whaling and moving towards ‘whale whispering’.
‘Technopoetic’ is a term that has its roots in literary critisicm. It was coined by S B Purdey (PURDY, S. B. 1984. Technopoetics: Seeing What Literature Has to Do with the Machine. Critical Inquiry, 11, 130-140), that linked poetry with machinery. More broadly, as a compound neologism that links technology and poetics, it can be understood as a way of describing the aesthetics and meaning that emerges through the entanglement of art and technology.
The alternative term I considered was technoetic, coined by Roy Ayers. In many ways it is apt given it’s connotations with Ascott’s telematics and the association with aesthetics of consciousness, but it is not an intuitively simple neologism to grasp in that way that technopoetics is, and would require a lot more unpacking for a non-specialist reader than this 6000 word article can support.
LAST DAY IN THE MARE OFFICE - 29 January 2023
In the morning I continued to work on the co-authored article with Marko & João. Laura will give us her notes on a draft and perhaps some additional suggestions for literature about cetacean communication. Myself and Marko will continue to work together over zoom in the first couple of weeks of January, when I’m back in Glasgow.
João drove me and Francisco and one of the insect team to the Whale Museum in Canical, which was fascinating. The modern part of the museum has several quite gimmicky 3D video exhibits and a bad attempt at an interactive audio installation that was supposed to play whale vocalisations, but the other part of the museum focused on the history of whaling in Madeira and was absolutely fascinating.
