Kelp Dreams

by Zeynep Abes & Ellie Schmidt

Macrocystis kelp is a giant of the ocean, growing over a foot a day from murky depths. These algal ocean forests have held critical habitat for fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals for thousands of years. Kelp dreams is a portrait of Southern California kelp forests, reconstructed from field captures using Gaussian splatting, an neural rendering technique, paired with hydrophone recordings. Can AI-driven immersive media visualize the constant movements of the ocean, interspecies dynamics, and our embodied human relationship to them?

Video by Zeynep Abes

Audio Design by Ellie Schmidt