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Ersin Han Ersin
Biography
Ersin Han Ersin (b. 1984, Turkey) is an artist and director of Marshmallow Laser Feast, a London-based artist collective renowned for its pioneering experiential artworks. His practice spans sculpture, installation, live performance, merging art, ecology and technology to reveal the hidden natural forces that govern our shared Earth. Ersin’s works invite audiences to explore realms beyond ordinary perception, often stripping away the visible physical world to uncover interconnected networks, systems, and processes fundamental to life on Earth.
Notable projects include Of the Oak, commissioned by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, commissioned by the Barbican Centre, and Breathing with the Forest for Emergence Magazine’s Shifting Landscapes. His debut at Saatchi Gallery, We Live in an Ocean of Air, explored the symbiotic relationship between humans and trees through a breathtaking virtual journey. His work In the Eyes of the Animal, an immersive look into woodland ecosystems, was shortlisted for Design Museum’s Design of the Year award and earned the Wired Innovation Award in 2016. Most recently, Ersin and the Marshmallow Laser Feast team received the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Treehugger: Wawona, a virtual reality piece exploring humanity’s connection to ancient trees, which also won Best VR Film at VR Arles Festival.
Ersin’s installations have exhibited around the globe, with exhibitions at ACMI, Barbican Centre, Venice Biennale, YCAM, DDB Seoul, Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Sundance Film Festival, Istanbul Design Biennial, and in major cultural hubs such as London, New York, and Shanghai. Born in Turkey in 1984, Ersin studied Visual Communication Design at Gazi University in Ankara and pursued a master’s degree in Computational Studio Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Gallery
in courtesy of Marshmallow Laser Feast
About the talk
In the Mind of the Whale
What is the ocean to a mind that sees with sound?
In Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale, Marshmallow Laser Feast follows a bottlenose dolphin, a humpback whale and a sperm whale into the depths, entering the umwelt of each: the sensory world an animal lives inside and can never step out of. For cetaceans, that world is made largely of sound. A click returns as the shape of a reef. A song crosses an ocean basin. Light fades within a few hundred metres, but echoes carry on.
Ersin Han Ersin pairs this journey with a performance lecture on the planetary systems these animals move through. Ocean currents carry heat, salt, nutrients and life around the Earth on a circuit that takes a thousand years to complete, and in the Atlantic that circuit is weakening. Drawing on Thich Nhat Hanh's idea of interbeing, the talk is a meditation on where a body ends and the ocean begins, and on how a process too vast to see can enter our attention.
Short version
Marshmallow Laser Feast's Ersin Han Ersin moves from the sound-built worlds of dolphins and whales to the ocean currents that carry them. Part talk, part meditation, it explores umwelt, interbeing and a slowing Atlantic, asking where a body ends and the planet begins.
