The IAS galleries are closed for installation. We will open our next exhibition on May 29, 2025.
Sound Portal for Whale Bubbles is a body of work by Yolande Harris which arose from a series of questions: How can human technological extensions – hydrophones, data collecting whale tags – offer opportunities to deepen our listening within global ecosystems? What might whale breath and bubbles communicate? What could a truth and reconciliation commission for marine mammals sound like?
This exhibition is a satellite exhibition of Weather & the Whale, on view at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Weather & the Whale, takes whale histories and migration routes as a starting point and provocation through which to promote climate justice in our communities. These exhibitions are the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz.
Yolande Harris is a composer, sound and video artist with an international research practice on the transformative potential of sound and listening in times of environmental change. Working for over a decade with scientists at the forefront of bio-acoustic research into marine mammals, her projects explore respect and advocacy for the environment and other species, approached through a sonic sensibility. As our listening becomes increasingly amplified by technologies, sonic methodologies foreground different ways of knowing. Her work asks, how can our conscious listening affect the world around us? How can learning to listen to underwater sounds transform us, and transform our relationship to the environment?
Yolande is Assistant Teaching Professor in Music and Inaugural Principal Faculty in Creative Technologies at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). She was Assistant Professor in Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), taught digital media art at San Jose State University and has held major research fellowships throughout Europe and the US. She exhibits her projects worldwide in venues ranging from intimate concerts and walks to international museums including, Issue Project Room (New York), Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), the House of World Cultures (Berlin) and UCLA/Getty’s PST Art.
Yolande harris: Sound Portal for Whale Bubbles is organized in collaboration with the Seymour Marine Discovery Center as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience and funded by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund.
Image: Blown glass ‘whale bubbles’, part of installation (2024)
