BSC scientists and digital artists collaborate at Sónar+D to uncover the hidden dynamics of the planet's largest marine ecosystem

12 June 2024
The art installation ‘Liquid Strata’, by oceanographer Joan Llort and creators Entangled Others and Daphne Xanthopoulou, shows in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion the characteristics of a twilight zone of the ocean with a crucial impact on climate change

Maria Arnal and other artists present their artist-in-residence projects at the BSC as part of the European AIR initiative of S+T+ARTS to promote synergies between science and art.

The BSC will conduct an experiment to detect the movements of all Sónar attendees through the position of their mobile phones.

When science and art meet, the invisible becomes visible and the complex is transformed into beauty, offering a new dimension to explore and understand nature in all its expression. This is demonstrated in the collaboration between the oceanographer Joan Llort, scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), and the artists Entangled Others and Daphne Xanthopoulou, creators of the digital art installation ‘Liquid Strata’. The work will be the centrepiece of the SonarMies space, which each year exhibits an artistic intervention specially conceived to be integrated into the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion as part of the programme of Sónar, the Barcelona Festival of Music, Innovation and Creativity to be held from 13 to 15 June.

Liquid Strata is the result of a long collaboration between Llort and Entangled Others, a collective made up of artists Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick, internationally renowned for using machine learning and generative simulation to visualise new biological forms and ecosystems. The installation is based on a novel use of scientific data to reveal the dynamics of the particles and fauna of the largest marine ecosystem on the planet: the mesopelagic, also known as the twilight zone because it is where light barely penetrates, and which contains the largest biomass of invertebrates on Earth.

Also contributing to the work is artist Daphne Xanthopoulou, who, based on data collected by researchers in the mesopelagic zone, has been responsible for capturing in sound the vital characteristics of one of the largest and most mysterious ecosystems on Earth. This zone, which connects the surface ocean to the deep ocean, has a crucial impact on the evolution of climate change because of its ability to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In fact, the ocean is considered the largest natural carbon sink on the planet, absorbing approximately 25-30% of the CO emitted by human activities each year.

Knowledge about how carbon is transported through the deep, dark ocean is full of gaps, so it is necessary to complement observations (satellite or in situ) with Earth System models. These models are simulations of the planet that mathematically represent the Earth's surface, atmosphere, ice and, of course, the ocean. Thanks to its ability to model these complex and crucial processes, the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer allows BSC scientists to study the ocean's role in the global carbon cycle.

By collaborating with artists to create the work, Llort aims to raise public awareness of the mesopelagic, which is increasingly threatened by deep-sea mining and industrial fishing, and to open the debate about its conservation. "It is easy to understand the threats to the Amazon rainforest when we see it burning. But how can we protect and raise awareness of the importance of a liquid ecosystem that lies 600 metres below the ocean's surface?” says Llort, a scientist in the Climate Variability and Change (CVC) group of BSC's Department of Earth Sciences. “I think art can be an excellent ally of science and conservation in this regard.”

Liquid Strata, which has been made possible thanks to a Joan Oró grant from the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació (FCRI) and the Fundació Mies, can be visited from the afternoon of 12 June until the end of the festival on 15 June. In addition, the Sónar public will be able to learn about the conceptual, artistic and technological aspects of this collaborative work between scientists and artists at the audiovisual conference ‘Diving into Liquid Strata’ that will take place at the Stage+D of the main Sónar by Day venue on Friday 14 June 2024 at 4pm.

Innovation through art and science

The SonarMies installation is not the only collaboration between artists and scientists from the BSC to be presented at Sónar 2024. For the eleventh consecutive edition, the BSC's Data Analysis and Visualisation group will be represented at the festival to showcase examples of research that exploit the power of supercomputers such as the MareNostrum in an innovative format of joint work between artists and scientists.

In this edition, the BSC will exhibit at Sónar (Thursday 13 at 12h in Project Area and at 18.30h in Sónar Lounge) the work with artists Maria Arnal, Filippo Nassetti and Richard Vijgen in the framework of the AIR project of S+T+ARTS, a European initiative that aims to promote collaboration between artists and scientists to advance science.

"We are working with artists in residence on projects related to the concept of air that allow us to explore some of the invisible elements that surround us. At Sónar+D, we will showcase this collaboration between scientists and artists, who will be present at the festival to showcase the progress of the projects and discuss new ideas,’ said Fernando Cucchietti, who leads the Data Analysis and Visualisation group at the BSC.

The collaborative project of Cucchietti's team with Maria Arnal (Impossible Larynx) integrates voice processing models and a 3D visualisation of the vocal tract to develop a novel artificial intelligence music tool to overcome the physical limits of the human voice, as well as medical and social applications.

The collaboration with Filippo Nassetti (Breathing Architectures) drives the development of new simulation models of the respiratory system that will enable more accurate solutions of the human digital twin, developed by the team led by BSC researcher Beatriz Eguzkitza.

Meanwhile, Richard Vijgen (Electric Atmospheres) has worked with BSC researchers Josep de La Puente and Octavio Castillo to find the limits of supercomputing in the simulation of urban electromagnetic waves, such as those produced by mobile phones, with which he visualises and creates the invisible landscapes that surround us.

Sonar as a laboratory

The Data Analysis and Visualisation team will renew an experiment it carried out in 2015 called ‘We know what you did last Sónar’, for which it developed a technology that made it possible to track the position of all the mobile devices of all the festival attendees in order to reproduce their movements. For this edition, the system has improved both the quality and the scope of its detection capacity, which will optimise the mobility models that the BSC is working on to understand the behaviour of attendees at mass events.

The aim is to export this technology to other major events, such as matches at Camp Nou, the Festa Major de Gràcia or the America's Cup, including evacuation scenarios. The experiment, in collaboration with Fira Montjuïc and the company Wizzie, is part of the BSC vCity project to develop urban digital twins to test urban policies before applying them in real life.