ArtscienceAIResearch
Alex Jordan
Biography
Alex Jordan is an Australian marine biologist who leads the Behavioural Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Konstanz. He works underwater, in the oceans and lakes where fish live, and asks what their behaviour can and cannot tell us about their experience. He uses art as a bridge to the non-human world, and his collaborations with SUPERFLEX, Tomás Saraceno, Antoine Bertin and Ingo Niermann have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Desert X, The Shed and the UN Ocean Conference.
Gallery
Alex Jordan
About the talk
The Behavioural Nebula and the underwater event horizon
When we go underwater we are guests: we rely on life support for breathing, sound travels differently, colour shifts and disappears, and our intuitions no longer map onto the world we are in.
As a scientist, I spend most of my life underwater studying the behavior of aquatic animals such as fish. I observe how they court, fight, build, bond. I learn from watching them and often wonder: can humans ever comprehend how an animal perceives, feels, or thinks ?
If science cannot pass from observation to experience, what can? I use art as a bridge to the non-human world and ask what does it mean to represent, or design for, another species? With artists and architects I have placed sculptures on the seabed for fish to inhabit, played a fish's heartbeat to a human audience, and made a floor tremble as a spider's web does. Perhaps none of this will tell us what an animal feels, but it certainly puts our bodies somewhere unfamiliar, where we sense how much of the world is not made for us.
I have been working on an idea called the Behavioural Nebula, a representation of non-human ways of being that recalls the scale and majesty of the universe itself. During this talk, we will fly through this space together and ask what it can teach us about a world beyond the reach of our senses.
