Victoria Evans

Doctoral Researcher: Victoria Evans (she/her)

HEIs: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art 

Host organisation: MARE–Madeira/ ARDITI 

Duration of the internship: Full-time for 3 months

PhD title: Where Do I End and You Begin?

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Why did you decide to undertake an internship?

My PhD is practice-based, so my research involves creating artworks in a variety of media, ranging from sculpture through filmmaking and sound composition, to experimental fiction. These artworks speculate on the power of sound as a material force that connects us tangibly to the wider environment and each other.  Part of my research touches on the physics of sound, and how it interacts with the medium in which it is situated (such as air or water). I was keen to understand more about underwater acoustics, and as a SGSAH funded researcher I had the amazing opportunity to seek out and design my own residency experience. I decided to try to find a research centre focused on the marine environment that would be willing to host an artist without a predefined outcome, in the hope that something genuinely collaborative might emerge.   

Specifically, I wanted to: 

1. Broaden my experience of interdisciplinary collaboration across art, science, and technology. 

1. Step away from my PhD for a while in order to test emerging ideas with others, gain some knowledge of marine acoustics that might be relevant to the broad themes of my PhD. 
2. Make international connections and gain experience that could potentially facilitate further art-science collaborative opportunities later in my career.
    

What was your internship and what did you do?

Detail from an Instagram story I posted at the start of the residency. It shows  a detail from a map of the Atlantic Ocean floor (Funchal Natural History Museum) showing how steeply the sea floor descends to the depths around the island of Madeira. The orange colour is the land visible above sea level. 

 

My residency was with MARE-Madeira, a Portuguese marine research centre located in Funchal the capital of Madeira, a subtropical island in the Eastern Atlantic. The technology department in MARE are working on several projects developing low-cost acoustic monitoring technology together with citizen science projects connected with Madeira’s scuba diving and whale watching industries. Madeira is a very special place for marine research since its volcanic topography means the shore slopes very steeply downwards just a little way from the coastline. This gives easier access to the deep sea for scientists and means that large marine mammals are common in local waters.  

I was very interested in exploring how the scientists collect acoustic data, and about how hearing and vocal communication function in underwater environments, I was also interested in learning more about anthropogenic threats to the marine environment such as noise pollution. Aside from these general areas of interest, I wanted the experience of being at Mare-Madeira to mould any artwork I would create there, and so I didn’t want to define my project parameters in advance. 

After a couple of Zoom meetings with my mentor Marko Radeta who was incredibly open and enthusiastic, we agreed to see what would emerge organically from me being there. The three loose goals we agreed to aim for (where possible) as residency outcomes were to:  

• collaborate on an (unspecified) artistic project involving underwater acoustics;  
• conduct a public sharing of the work in progress at the end of the residency;  
• write up the details of the collaboration as a co-authored journal article.  

In the end, against all the odds we achieved all of these things more or less within the time frame of the residency. I just worked for a couple of weeks afterwards with Marko, through zoom meetings, in order to finish and submit the article.

 

The Whale Whisperer a handheld wireless listening device programmed to play a series of whale calls. The speaker and base unit were 3d printed in PLA. The shell-like appearance of the speaker is based on the shape and dimensions of a blue whale’s ear bone. Collaboration by Victoria Evans, João Pestana, & Marko Radeta with scientific input from Laura Radaelli. 

 

Some work in progress images of the Whale Whisperer design process.

 

In the end I collaborated with Marko and electronics expert João Pestana (with input on whale vocalisations from marine biology PhD researcher Laura Radaelli) to develop an interactive artwork I call The Whale Whisperer. The Whale Whisperer is a portable wireless listening device designed to evoke a connection between land and sea dwellers and provoke questions about underwater perceptual worlds. The device takes the form of a a handheld, 3d printed, rechargeable speaker in the shape of a whale otilith (ear bone). When lifted to the ear it is programmed to play the distinctive calls of the Blue, Fin, Humpback, and Sperm whale to an individual listener. The act of private listening lends the experience the one-to-one intimacy of a phone call.

 

What aspects of the internship did you find most rewarding?

Selfie on board a research boat with marine biologist Laura Radaelli and her colleagues.

 

I spent the first month immersing myself in the subject matter, reading a lot, quizzing anyone who would speak to me about their work, and coming up with a slate of initial ideas. It was amazing to have daily access to such an incredible breadth of expertise, especially in the technology department, known as Wave Labs. I listened in on everything and asked as many questions as I could think of. The team there is used to collaborating across disciplines, and the patience and welcome they showed me from the start was incredibly generous. 

 

Brainstorming the Whale Whisperer’s tech spec with my technologist collaborators. Engineer João Pestana (left) and my mentor, computer scientist and lecturer, Marko Radeta (right).

 

It was a little harder to find an immediate point of commonality with the marine biologists, despite my fascination for their subject. I was painfully aware how amorphous my open ended research methodology might sound in comparison to their scientific research where the project parameters are meticulously designed from the outset. Happily, I was able to spend some time with a researcher whose interests seemed well aligned to my own. I was invited out on a couple of field trips with marine biology PhD student Laura Radaelli, whose uses hydrophones to record dolphin and whalecalls. These data collection expeditions out on the research boat, were truly thrilling.On the second trip our search was rewarded visually as well as sonically when a group of pilot whales got really close and swam towards and under our small boat. 

 

A small pod of pilot whales ‘at rest’ swim slowly past our research boat as we record their calls.

 

Ironically the research vessels, charged with the science of conservation, still employ similar techniques to those used during the whaling era, with a spotter based at a viewpoint on land with binoculars, radioing the locations and movements of the animals to the pilot and scientist on board the research boat. Thankfully they are now usually equipped with hydrophones (underwater microphones) rather than harpoons. Back on land, Laura also introduced me to some of the visual analysis techniques she uses to understand what it is her hydrophones have picked up.

 

A recording from one of the field trips with Laura, using my own hydrophone and portable sound recorder alongside her scientific equipment. Here the sound wave is viewed in the form of a spectrogram. The reversed tick shaped ‘scratch’ to the right of the spectrogram is the dolphin whistle. High frequency sounds like this are often easier to ‘see’ than hear. 

 

If these whale listening trips were not enough, I also got to refresh my scuba diving skills and go on some deep dives in the marine nature reserve where Mare place their acoustic monitoring devices. I felt I was literally being immersed in the subject I was studying. This is a kind of embodied learning that only a residential experience can bring. 

The last, rather more academic, but still enjoyable part of my residency was time spent co-authoring an academic journal article with Marko, João and Laura. I never thought I could write so fast! Now, if only my PhD thesis could be co-written that way…

 

Has the internship influenced your future plans at all?

Still from underwater video footage I shot from the research boat.

 

Perhaps it’s too early to say exactly what the residency will lead to in the future, since for now I’m focusing on finishing my PhD. But although I always like to keep my plans fluid (pun intended!) I can already see that the residency is influencing my current practice.  I’m developing an artist’s film exploring the materiality of sound. I’m sure it will touch on some of the watery acoustic experiences I had in in Madeira. 

 

What are some of the skills you have picked up or improved through the internship?

Researchers interact with The Whale Whisperer at MAD-Deep Symposium, Funchal, Madeira in December 2023.

There were so many ‘soft’ skills and such a breadth of knowledge that I absorbed in different ways during the three months, that it’s hard to know where to start. Even as a mature student, after being so isolated during the pandemic and being in the midst of a single-minded solo pursuit like a PhD it can be quite easy to forget you are a person with social skills and a wide range of competencies! So, I’d have to say a general renewing of confidence in my overall abilities was probably the biggest thing I gained. But there were smaller, more concrete wins too. For example: 

• I learned about the specifics of cetacean hearing and vocalization, which connects to my research interests in more-than-human worlds and communication across distance 
• I improved my understanding of the physics of sound, which I plan to use to underpin one of the chapters of my PhD.  
• And I learned 3d modelling software for 3d printing, which is a really useful skill to incorporate into my artistic practice.

Do you have any tips for researchers looking to do an internship?

My top tip is to take the time to dream big! 

An underwater shot of a swimmer just a few meters off the shore, Madeira. 

Dig deep; be imaginative; and find something you would truly love to do. Being a PhD student can open a lot of unexpected doors, and if you have funding this is even more the case. So, you can afford to be creative and ambitious when designing your own dream residency. Having said that, any experience worth having can be a challenge, so my advice would also be to give yourself the longest lead-in time possible to plan financially, practically, and emotionally for being away from home. Unlike the Instagram version of life, a residency experience is unlikely to be all plain sailing and sunshine. But the more a project or a place excites you, the more you will want to give to the experience and the more you are likely to get out of it in return.  

Where can people find out more?

A weekly diary of my twelve week residency can be found here.

For info on my other artworks, visit my website.

MARE Madeira’s blog.