Fish Phone Booth
Description
Researchers at Scripps Oceanography have been eavesdropping on marine soundscapes for decades to study animals and the threats they face. High-frequency Acoustic Recording Packages (HARPs) use underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to capture everything from whale songs and dolphin clicks to passing ships and military sonar.
Inspired by this work, Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey invite us into an interactive audio experience that blends storytelling with a guided sound bath. Inside a phone booth, participants embark on an underwater journey, tuning in to both animal and human-made sounds—and responding with their own vocalizations. Outside the booth, people’s movements are tracked, creating visual trails that echo the migratory patterns of sea life.
The project poses thought-provoking questions: What if the animals we listen to could talk back? What if a fish could text you about ocean noise? Could a phone call connect us to an “internet of animals,” and what would that mean? This work brings ocean acoustics and the idea of an “internet of animals” to life, transforming data beyond human perception into an immersive sensory experience.
Fish Phone Booth is a project of Ash Eliza Smith + Robert Twomey (A Speculative Devices x Cohab Labs Production). Production, Graphic and Experience Design support: Sam Bendix. Developer, Design support: Reid Brockmeier. Dramaturgy: Micha? Stankiewicz. Prototyped in support from the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival, Worlds In Play and The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.
https://aquarium.ucsd.edu/newsroom/embodied-pacific-ocean-unseen
Documentation
Installation View at Birch Aquarium
Installation view showing overhead tracking and in-booth experience.
Entering the phone number to begin.
Docent explaining project concept.
Entrance to Getty PST: Embodied Pacific Ocean Unseen at the Birch Aquarium.
Interspecies Communication
Fish Phone Booth – La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival 2024
This collaboration with Birch Aquarium will unfold and build through different phases over the next year. For this first prototype at WOW, a small booth is transformed into a listening device where participants encounter ocean life at a 1:1 scale through a sensory experience of sound and touch. The audience can explore the undersea world, tuning in to signals within the natural and human-made ocean soundscape and responding with their vocalizations. Viewer choices shape the evolving sound mix, like a monitoring station or deep sea observatory. Outside the booth, people’s movements are tracked through the room, accumulating visual trails that echo the migratory patterns of sea life. This project brings research from ocean observation and the internet of animals to life, translating data from outside the limits of human perception into bodily and sonic experiences.
https://lajollaplayhouse.org/wowfestival/event/fish-phone-booth-playtest
Interspecies Communication Theater – ASU Worlds in Play 2024
Interspecies Communication Theater is a geospatial interactive audio and storytelling project in development with the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Without Walls at the La Jolla Playhouse. We are working with scientists, data, and machine learning (AI) to engage the public with ocean acoustics, a broad field focused on studying sound, its propagation, and behavior underwater. Akin to sound channels occurring underwater, we are experimenting with an always-on audio-driven sonic experience that uses sounds from a kelp forest to marine life—which, at times, use smell, sight, and touch as cues, their most effective mode of communication is through acoustic cues, or sound – both vocal and non-vocal. Like using a hydrophone underwater, the audience may tune in to different listening posts throughout the aquarium. Voice interaction could allow players to choose narrative flows and soundscapes. This layered, participatory audio structure echoes the hydroacoustic ecology of the ocean itself. It aims to engage the public in a deep understanding of oceanographic research, potentially informing interspecies design—a multi-perspective design approach.
https://worldsinplay.com/Robert-Twomey-and-Ash-Eliza-Smith
