Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath

Installation view Descent, Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, 2026

Descent

The journey begins on the deck of the research vessel OceanXplorer, a ship full of advanced scientific and media equipment. We hear a mechanical hum and the lively chatter of crew members on the deck—sounds of anticipation before the launch of a submersible to travel through the depths of the ocean to environments that few humans have seen. Visitors take a virtual step into the hatch of a submersible and experience the dive starting from the ocean’s surface, slowly descending beneath the waves and into the depths of the ocean surrounded by a symphony of marine recordings blurring the boundaries between the museum galleries and the vastness of the ocean. Here, visitors can discover an expansive world filled with an astonishing diversity of creatures that have adapted to the extremes of the deep.

Throughout the galleries, audiences will be exposed to some of the most remote and rarely seen environments on Earth, revealing fragile ecosystems, unfamiliar species and geological formations hidden for millions of years. It is a reminder that Earth has one interconnected ocean with many features, and much of it remains unexplored.

Installation View Photic Zone, Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, 2026

Photic Zone

Stretching from the ocean’s surface to approximately 200 metres below, the Photic Zone is the sunlit layer of the sea where light penetrates the water column. Although it represents a thin layer of the ocean, the Photic Zone sustains an extraordinary abundance of life from microscopic plankton to corals, fish and marine mammals. This richness is captured in immersive footage by OceanX, revealing ecosystems teeming with diverse life. At these depths, photosynthesis occurs at high volumes. Vast numbers of phytoplankton produce oxygen and form the basis of all marine food webs.

In this Zone, visitors encounter important coral research from the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum of the Faculty of Science at the National University of Singapore. Italian artist Marco Barotti demonstrates how acoustic enrichment, which involves broadcasting natural sounds from healthy ecosystems, can support ecological recovery and restoration. Here, and at each zone, Norwegian scent artist Sissel Tolaas expands perception beyond sight and sound, engaging visitors’ sense of smell and shining a spotlight on a new way to experience the ocean. In the immersive experience Dive & Discover, created by OceanX in collaboration with Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, visitors take a virtual step into a submersible to begin a journey from the ocean’s surface. Descending beneath the waves, visitors can actively explore the depths—spotting, scanning and identifying a diverse range of marine species along the way.

The Photic Zone is a highly dynamic marine layer shaped by ocean currents, atmospheric forcings and seasonal changes in light availability. The Photic Zone is also the part of the ocean most directly influenced by human activity. Increases in water temperature, pollution and nutrient imbalances leave drastic and often immediate impacts, processes that are examined in the work of Slovenian artist Robertina Šebjanič.

To better understand how life thrives throughout these complex systems, scientists increasingly rely on environmental DNA (eDNA)—the microscopic genetic traces left behind in seawater and sediment. Through a collaboration led by OceanX with Singaporean artist Ong Kian Peng, British wildlife filmmaker James Honeyborne, and the University of Bristol, immersive experience, eDNA Detectives invites visitors to step into the role of marine scientists searching for clues within water samples. Participants collect and analyse eDNA, uncovering which underwater creatures have left their traces in these virtual waters. Collective animal behaviours, where large groups of species move in coordinated ways within this living ocean layer, are further visualised by the Thai collective bit.studio, translating ecological data on locomotion and synchronisation into dynamic, emergent formations reminiscent of flying schools of fish.

As the ocean’s most visible and productive layer, the Photic Zone highlights the deep interconnection between human life and marine ecosystems. It is a space of both abundance and vulnerability where sunlight sustains life and where the consequences of human actions are felt most immediately. This Zone celebrates the ocean’s vital role in supporting life and regulating Earth’s climate, offering an entry point into the vast, interconnected systems that bind humanity to the sea.

Marco Barotti Coral Sonic Resilience 2025–2026

Courtesy of the artist

This version of the work is commissioned by ArtScience Museum, Singapore

Coral Sonic Resilience is an immersive audiovisual journey that explores the unseen connections between humans, sound, and the underwater world. At the heart of the film are underwater sound sculptures that play recordings of healthy reefs into damaged ecosystems, creating acoustic habitats that attract marine life and support ecological recovery. Through poetic visuals, field recordings of vibrant reef environments, shamanic chants, animations, and electronic soundscapes, Beyond Us invites audiences to listen deeply to the ocean and rethink our relationship with it.

Developed in collaboration with marine biologists and grounded in scientific research on acoustic enrichment, The film reveals sound as both a tool for ecological regeneration and a shared language between human and more-than-human worlds.

Thank you to the Ocean and the more-than-human communities.

Video: Gabriele Castellani, Bethany Dean, Luca Larson, Marco Barotti

Editing: Anna Anderegg, Marco Barotti 

Media Design: Rahul Sharma, overlapping_studio

Soundscape: Marco Barotti

Mastering: Mattia Tuliozi

Featured in the soundscape: Shinto Singing: JyoKan Ono, Mudang: Shaman Eunmi Pang, Horogai (conch shell): Daizaburo Sakamoto

Robertina Šebjanič,  Echinoidea Future—Adriatic Sensing 2022

Courtesy of the artist

Echinoidea Future – Adriatic Sensing, addresses the current biogeological and morphological conditions in the sea urchin environment, which is aquaformed by anthropogenic liquid waste, resulting in low oxygen levels in the seawater. Exploring the stressors of the local/global human footprint, the project demonstrates the resilience of aquatic species. Echinoidea future – Adriatic Sensing acts as an activation of (sy)(e)mpathia.

Artist (concept, sound & video editing, execution): Robertina Šebjanič

Video support A.I.: Tanja Minarik

Scientific advisory: dr. Alenka Malej, dr. Matjaž Ličer; UR Institute: Gjino Šutić, Filip Grgurević; Institute for Marine and Coastal Research University of Dubrovnik: dr. Marijana Hure, dr. Valter Kozul

Production: UR Institute, STARTS4Water 2022

Production support: Zavod Sektor, PiNA, Miha Godec, Ivanka Pasalic (Glassblowing), David

Drolc (Metal construction).

Installation view, Twilight Zone, Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, 2026

Deep-sea Creatures and Corals

From 200 to 1,000 metres below the ocean’s surface lies the Twilight Zone, also known as the Mesopelagic Zone, a realm of dim light, cold temperatures and high pressure. Despite its relative darkness, this zone is alive with life and movement. Each night, vast numbers of animals migrate upward to feed and return to the depths by day in a vertical migration. This is the largest animal migration on Earth. Through vertical movement and sinking, carbon is transported from surface waters to the deep ocean, delivering nutrients to deeper layers of the ocean and throughout the water column while regulating Earth’s climate. Visitors can dive deeper into the ocean’s layers through DataXplorer, an interactive experience developed by OceanX in partnership with the University of Bristol and James Honeyborne. This visually striking installation presents an artistic interpretation of data collected by a CTD (Conductivity, Temperature and Depth) instrument—an oceanographic tool that measures how water temperature and salinity change with depth. As visitors approach the data wall, they are invited to embody an ocean current, revealing the hidden life that thrives in the deep. Within this Zone, a dendrogram maps the phylogenetic relationships between species as a branching genetic tree, connecting surface feeders to deep-sea communities through evolution.

Survival here depends on extraordinary adaptations. Many organisms in the Twilight Zone rely on bioluminescence—producing their own light—to communicate, attract prey, deter predators, or camouflage themselves in the faint glow filtering from above. This living light, captured in OceanX footage, reveals a world where flashes, glows and pulses replace light as we know it. Other species sense their surroundings through sound, vibration, pressure and chemical cues, operating in sensory realms far beyond human perception. These hidden worlds are explored in Marshmallow Laser Feast’s immersive works, which translate echolocation and nonhuman perception into spatial experience. American artist Lachlan Turczan responds to the Twilight Zone’s fragile light conditions by transforming sound and energy into shifting luminous forms that echo both bioluminescent life and the instability of perception at depth.

Together, these works reveal a Zone shaped not by vision alone, but by movement, signal and sensation, reminding us of the profound interconnectedness between deep‑sea life and human existence.

Lachlan Turczan, Lucida 2025

Courtesy of the artist

Lucida, an immersive light sculpture reveals the unseen architectures of sound, energy, and perception. Transforming light into a tactile, embodied experience, the work invites viewers to encounter waveforms as living systems rather than abstract data. As you pass through the beams, the work responds to your movement, activating shifting planes of light that curve, ripple, and momentarily crystallise before dissolving again. Rooted in physics and sensory awareness, Lucida makes the invisible perceptible, reflecting on the interconnected forces that govern both deep-sea ecologies and human experience, where art, technology, and nature converge in a fleeting choreography of light and sound.

Installation View, Aphotic Zone, Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, 2026

Aphotic Zone

Beginning at 1,000 metres below the ocean’s surface and extending to the seafloor, the Aphotic Zone makes up the majority of the ocean, reaching its deepest point at the Mariana Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean, nearly 11,000 metres down. Sunlight never enters this realm of permanent darkness, cold temperatures and immense pressure. Life here survives without photosynthesis, relying on sinking organic matter or chemical energy to exist. Many organisms exhibit extraordinary adaptations, including bioluminescence, heightened sensory perception and slower metabolisms—so that limited food can sustain life for longer.

Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen invites audiences to practice deep listening, using recordings from extreme marine environments to reveal fragile acoustic worlds beyond human hearing. Deep‑sea creatures and corals, documented through OceanX expeditions and specimens from the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, offer rare insights into life adapted to total darkness. British wildlife filmmaker James Honeyborne retells the story of OceanX’s ‘brine pools’ expedition, filmed whilst making the BBC’s Blue Planet II series. Visitors to the exhibition encounter brine pools—the hypersaline and toxic basins—that exist on the seafloor in only a few places in the world.

Though rarely seen, the Aphotic Zone plays a crucial role in Earth’s systems, storing carbon, regulating climate and sustaining deep‑ocean food webs that connect the deepest seas to life at the surface.

Installation View, Deep-sea Creatures and Corals, Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, 2026

Deep-sea Creatures and Corals

Despite the extreme conditions, many creatures live in the deepest, darkest parts of our oceans. The darkest places on earth exist below 1,000 meters, where sunlight cannot reach. In the dark, 4°C water, cold water corals thrive by filtering food from water (suspension feeding) of zooplankton and organic debris that floats down from above. There are more coral species in the deep ocean than in tropical coral reefs. Deep-water corals exist everywhere from tropical waters to polar oceans. Some species of cold-water coral can live for thousands of years, making them an incredible data resource relating to climate and ocean currents over millions of years.

Installation view, Resurface, Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, 2026

Resurface

After a journey through the depths of the ocean, Resurface returns visitors to the shallow surface waters of the ocean. In shallow coastal waters, seagrass meadows emerge, showing us the variety of vital ecosystems that exist in the ocean. Seagrass meadows provide protection as nurseries for countless marine species and are powerful stores of blue carbon. They capture and store large amounts of carbon dioxide and transfer it into sediments for long periods of time, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change. 

Though often overlooked and understudied, seagrass meadows stabilise coastlines, improve water quality and support biodiversity close to shore. 

This Zone showcases an innovative approach to seagrass restoration inspired by traditional fishing traps used by Tunisian fishermen. Led by marine ecologist and OceanX Education Resident, Nada Abdelkader, and developed in partnership with the University of Bristol and James Honeyborne, Seagrass Stories invites visitors to use simple gestures to interact with the traps—initiating the planting of seagrass and watching the meadow gradually flourish and become more resilient as more people take part. Visitors also meet the people of OceanX: the scientists, explorers and storytellers who venture into the unknown to better understand and protect the ocean’s blue heart.

Resurface concludes with a call to action. Through a partnership with WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature), visitors are invited to participate in regional seagrass restoration efforts, offering a simple and meaningful way to contribute to the recovery of these essential ecosystems and to the future health of our oceans.