I went to a lecture hosted by The Explorers Club called “Art of the Invisible Ocean.”  The speakers were Mara G. Haseltine and Emily Driscoll.  Haseltine is an artist who creates 3D sculptures of microscopic life.  She is also an  environmentalist who aims to use art as bridge between  biological and cultural evolution.  She helped to create New York City’s first solar-powered reef.  Haseltine currently uses  microscopy as inspiration to create oyster and coral reefs.  Driscoll is a video director specifically for topics of science, and is the founder of BonSci films, a production company specializing in science and art documentaries. She has worked on films about invasive species, restoring wild oysters to New York Harbor, and preserving fireflies in the environment – all which have been screened at many museums, universities and PBS television programs.

Together, the two teamed up to present their work on ocean microbiology.  The presentation started off with Haseltine explaining the invisible world of the ocean.  She says that a majority of marine life cannot be seen by the naked eye.  Organisms such as plankton are equivalent to plant-life in the ocean food-chain.  They are the basis of the food-chain and are so fundamental to a healthy environment.  Haseltine went on her expedition to collect plankton from oceans.  When she looked at the plankton under a microscope, she discovered that all her plankton samples were wrapped around in microscopic plastic.  She believes that this is the result of pollution of the oceans and that this ongoing problem of pollution has a much more detrimental and microscopic effect that people do not realize.

The talk was then followed by two films.  The first film was a documentary called Invisible Ocean: Plankton and Plastic that she and Driscoll created on her artwork of glass plankton sculptures.  The documentary focuses on how how critical of a problem pollution is and her artwork is used to visually show the impact of pollution on plankton. The second film was La Boheme: A Portrait of Today’s Oceans in Peril, which was an opera written by Haseltine based on the emotional love a person has for a depleting ocean.  In the film, a man is singing to her glass plankton sculptures.  The films were then followed by a question and answer session.

This was the first science lecture I went to that bridges art and science in a way that brings awareness to the environmental problem, but also really keep an artistic element to her work.  I really liked the examples of her plankton sculptures she showed us, and the documentary was very informative.  The opera, however, completely threw me off guard.  I am not really into art (and really not into operas) so I was really confused why a random man was singing to glass plankton. She explained that she based it off another opera, which did nothing to make me less confused. However, when I looked up La Boheme, the opera her work was based on, she gave a more detailed description on her site.  She states that the opera was about falling in love with someone that was dying.  Haseltine used this analogy to depict the emotions of falling in love with the “dying” ocean.  It was an interesting artistic angle of this pollution problem of the ocean – however, the piece did not make sense to me.  I can definitely see the appeal her work could have on someone who was both interested in art and science, and she does a really nice job in intertwining the two concepts.