Maritime Messaging: Red Hook

Software and technology development for performance and installation by Katherine Behar

On October 29, 2017, to commemorate the five-year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, fifteen performers journeyed from Wall Street to Red Hook on NYC Ferry boats. Standing as witnesses, they listened to the water and used iPads to broadcast its conversation. An unannounced performer, Tropical Storm Phillipe, made a guest appearance during the performance. Upstaging its human counterparts, Phillipe recalled the ghost of Sandy and underscored water’s vital impact.

The historic oil tanker the MARY A. WHALEN, home of PortSide NewYork, presented a sound installation with the gurgling ocean and AI’s conversation reverberating through its metallic hull.

To realize the vision of a conversation with the water, I used an LSTM neural net trained on a corpus from the Red Hook Water Stories collection. The network then generates texts in response to hydrophone recordings.