We kicked off the launch with a party at Pérez Art Museum on the Miami waterfront. Romulo Del Castillo provided the Miami jams following a panel discussion led by National Geographic explorer Alizé Carrère featuring Colin, NOAA scientist Dr. Ian Enochs, and Miami Beach’s environment & sustainability director Elizabeth Wheaton.
Update6/1/20: The CCC is now screening at the Miami International Airport as part of the Miami International Airport Moving Images (MIAmi) video installation series, located near gate J7:
Update 10/16/20: The CCC is now screening at the HistoryMiami Museum.
Join us Thursday, February 6th as we launch the Coral City Camera, our publicly accessible 360-degree livestream of a thriving, urban coral reef premiering at Pérez Art Museum Miami from a floating billboard in Biscayne Bay, produced by Bridge Initiative & Bas Fisher Invitational. Admission is free and open to the public as part of PAMM’s First Free Thursdays series.
In conjunction with the floating livestream, National Geographic Explorer Alizé Carrère will moderate a panel discussion featuring NOAA scientist Dr. Ian Enochs, Coral Morphologic’s Colin Foord, and Miami Beach’s environment & sustainability director Elizabeth Wheaton. The night continues on the terrace with a DJ set by Romulo Del Castillo. See you there, Miami!
For Design Miami 2019/, we debuted a preview of the Coral City Camera, a 360° live stream underwater camera located at our collaborative research site with NOAA’s AOML Coral Program. The CCC aims to supplement our urban coral research with real-time scientific data and offer a source of natural wonderment to the public, with the live stream officially going live in February 2020.
Over the past several years we’ve been working toward the installation of an underwater camera in Biscayne Bay as a component of our research into Miami’s coral ecosystems. Recently, with the support of Bas Fisher Invitational & Bridge Initiative under National Endowment for the Arts & Knight Foundation grants, we installed a 360° live stream underwater camera at our collaborative research site with NOAA’s AOML Coral Program. In addition to providing valuable scientific data, the live stream will be available free to the public as an educational tool and source of wonderment. The Coral City Camera live stream will be officially available to watch in February, with a preview at Design Miami/ December 3-8. Check out the video above to see how the camera was installed with View Into the Blue.
We are happy to report the new adidas flagship store in London features a Coral Morphologic video installation. Follow this link for the adidas_LDN location on Oxford Street and watch a tour of the store here.
Tangerine Reef, our audiovisual collaboration with Animal Collective, will have its first official screening in Canada on Friday, August 30th at the historic Grand Gerrard Theater in Toronto. Tickets are available here.
Pick up the 10th issue of FLOOD Magazine featuring a cover story on Animal Collective wherein they detail their history and our collaboration Tangerine Reef. Read the article here.
We are thrilled to share we’ll be curating ‘An Evening with Coral Morphologic‘ at the historic Tower Theater Miami on April 30th. In addition to inaugurating Tower’s new lobby projection system with a CM audiovisual installation, we’ll be showing a film program in the theater consisting of Miami’s first official Tangerine Reef screening, John McSwain’s CM documentary Coral City, and a Q & A session with CM, McSwain, and Brian Weitz of Animal Collective moderated by Miami-based writer and photographer Monica Uszerowicz.
The event is free and open to the public but we kindly ask patrons to RSVP at this link. The audiovisual installation/ happy hour runs 5-7pm, and the film program/ Q & A runs 7-9pm. We will have a version of the poster above for sale at the event, designed by Rob Carmichael of SEEN Studio.
Update 5/1/19: Our audiovisual installation in the theater’s lobby will run till early December – if you are in the area feel free to stop in and check it out.
We’re psyched to share a soundtrack of ours (‘Oolite’) is included on the second Space Tapes compilation. The album features artists based in or from Florida. Stream Space Tapes, Vol. 2 via Spotify and pick up the album in digital and vinyl editions @ https://spacetapesmia.bandcamp.com/album/space-tapes-vol-2-st009
Colin will join Animal Collective at CPH:DOX 2019 in Copenhagen, Denmark on Friday, March 22nd for a screening of Tangerine Reef followed by Q & A, plus live sets from AC’s Geologist and Deakin featuring visuals from us at Aveny-T. See this link for tickets.
Coral Morphologic was recently commissioned to build a high-tech indoor coral microfragmentation and wet lab by the Alligator Head Foundation in Portland, Jamaica. Additionally, a 300 gallon reef biotope was built to serve as an educational display. Over the course of three trips, the Coral Morphologic team coordinated purchasing, exporting, and constructing the AHF Marine Lab where it now serves both the local marine scientists working to protect the Alligator Head Marine Sanctuary, as well as international scientists that can visit and conduct their work with state-of-the-art equipment in a controlled laboratory setting.
On November 27th we embarked on the first field trip with researchers from NOAA and University of Miami for the next phase of Coral Morphologic’s long-term project to document, study, and conserve Miami’s unusually resilient ‘urban corals’. That is, the corals that have pioneered into Miami’s intercoastal waterways as larvae and settled onto man-made infrastructure. It is precisely Miami’s legacy of anthropogenic disturbance that led Coral Morphologic to recognize that the City was a real-world window in which to understand how corals may adapt and evolve to anthropogenic impacts.
Studying genetic variation and the underlying causes of these variations is at the heart of a global effort to identify more resilient coral genotypes capable of restoring degraded coral habitat. Most of this research has focused on traditionally healthy, offshore reef habitats and identifying corals that show more resilience to stress than neighbors, or in experimental lab settings with distinct coral colonies of the same species subjected to stressful conditions. However, our project proposes to sample the tissue of healthy coral colonies (specifically Pseudodiploria strigosa and Porites asteroides) living in less than ideal ‘urban’ conditions, as well as healthy coral living offshore in ‘natural’ conditions, to determine if the genetic variation between sites is significant. The sample sites will also be surveyed and scientifically described by community assessment and seasonal changes through photo mosaics, monitoring of water chemistry, temperature, pH, and light levels, to quantify and compare site conditions. The final phase of this project will involve transplanting corals to the tip of PortMiami from each of the ‘urban’ sites, along with fragments from the offshore, natural reef to compare how each is able to adapt, and eventually developing an ‘urban coral’ nursery to grow the most resilient coral genotypes for restoration of reefs and laboratory research.
But the first task in this year-long study was to characterize each of the study sites through photo-mosaics that create three dimensional maps using a pair of GoPro cameras. These maps will serve as our detailed baseline imagery to better understand the forces of coral recruitment, growth, mortality, competition from macroalgae, and the accumulation of trash/ debris over time. Watch the video above to see each of the three urban coral research sites and the techniques used to document them. We look forward to providing updates over the course of the year as we document the sites, analyze transcriptomes, transplant corals, and characterize range of water quality and chemical conditions that Miami’s urban corals endure.
Following their November 9th performance at Baltimore’s Parkway theater, Animal Collective will embark on a 3-date West Coast tour this December in support of our collaborative audiovisual album Tangerine Reef at two historic movie theaters in California – the Balboa in San Francisco on the 8th & 9th, and the Vista in Los Angeles on the 10th. Tickets are available via links above or in person at the theaters.
Tangerine Reef, our audiovisual collaboration with Animal Collective, is officially live! Watch the full film via AC’s website or direct via YouTube / Vimeo.
Read Part 2 (& Part 1) of our essay on super corals: ‘On Super Corals and Where to Find Them (A Closer Look at Miami’s Urban Coral Ecosystem)’ on Medium or click the link below:
We are psyched to share we’ve teamed with friends & collaborators Animal Collective to create the forthcoming audiovisual album Tangerine Reef in honor of the International Year of the Reef 2018. Watch the official trailer above & view the ‘Hair Cutter‘ music video via Apple Music. Pre-order the album before the August 17th release via the Tangerine Reefwebsite.
Avey Tare, Geologist, and Deakin performing Tangerine Reef live.
This past Saturday, Animal Collective and we debuted the live version of Tangerine Reef at David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption. Aquatic sights and sounds enmeshed to immerse the audience of Brooklyn Steel in the extraterrestrial underwater environ of Tangerine Reef.
Thank you to David Lynch for inviting us and the Festival of Disruption team for an amazing production. Stay tuned for the official release of Tangerine Reef this August.
The Tangerine Reef crew: Avey Tare, John McSwain, Deakin, J.D. McKay, Geologist, and Colin Foord.
This Saturday, May 19th we premiere the live version of Tangerine Reef at David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption. We’ll be offering a limited number of a special lunar phase calendar (seen below) at the show in honor of our audiovisual collaboration with Animal Collective.
Read Part 1 of our essay on super corals: ‘On Super Corals and Where to Find Them (Or a Cautionary Tale of Using Memes in Science)’ on Medium or click the link below:
Tonight is the premiere of One Strange Rock, the National Geographic television series to which we contributed coral & marine life footage. The Darren Aronofsky-produced, Will Smith-hosted 10-part series explores the fragility & wonder of planet Earth from the perspective of eight astronauts who spent time onboard the International Space Station.
“This is the story of Earth, from the only people who have ever left it.”
Watch the full episode of ‘Alien’, featuring our cinematography contributions:
We are psyched to share Coral Morphologic is a contributor of coral & marine life footage to the Darren Aronofsky-produced, Will Smith-hosted National Geographic television series One Strange Rock. Filmed in space & locations across 45 countries, the series explores the fragility & wonder of planet Earth from the perspective of eight astronauts who spent time onboard the International Space Station.
The 10-episode series debuts March 26, 2018; watch the trailer above.
We are grateful to present Coral Morphologic 1, an album of nine records inspired by the corals’ cosmic ability to synchronize their lives to Earth’s daily rotation upon its axis, the Moon’s monthly trip around Earth, and Earth’s yearly orbit of the Sun. CM 1 was written, produced, and mixed by Coral Morphologic and mastered by Adam McDaniel at Drop of Sun Studios, Asheville NC. The album features artwork by Robert Beatty, and the ‘Poster Edition’ of the album includes an 18″ x 24″ poster version of the album art, while the ‘Print Edition’ includes a set of nine 5″ x 5″ Coral Morphologic photographs representing each track on the album. Stream CM 1via Spotify and pick up the album in digital and poster / print editions @ https://coralmorphologic.bandcamp.com/album/coral-morphologic-1
During the 2018 NBA All-Star weekend, adidas held a two-day celebration of basketball culture at ROW DTLA in Los Angeles. The event, called 747 Warehouse St, brought together creators from the worlds of sports, music, fashion and design. To represent the oceans and rally new champions for the cause, Parley created an adidas X Parley X Coral Morphologic experience focused on the beauty and fragility of the oceans, featuring a CM video installation aimed at generating environmental awareness. Watch a highlight video from the event below.
2018 is the International Year of the Reef, a world-wide initiative enacted by the ICRI to strengthen awareness globally about the value of, and threats to, coral reefs. Learn more about #IYOR2018 with an immersive Google Earth Voyager Story.
Catch our new audiovisual piece 2317 projection-mapped onto the facade of the Faena Forum during Miami Art Week 2017, as part of the ‘Ediacaran Mind’exhibition. 2317 is visible nightly starting at sundown & shows Monday, December 4th – Saturday, December 9th.
One of the last tasks we took on before securing our laboratory prior to Hurricane Irma was check on the health of a community of endangered staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) just offshore Miami Beach. This community is one of the few remaining nearshore populations of these corals in Florida, and has proven to be more resilient than populations further south in Biscayne National Park, which have suffered from diseases in recent years. Because these staghorn corals along Miami Beach are growing on flat, hard seafloor, we knew that they were going to be subjected to significant wave energy during Hurricane Irma.
When we finally had a chance to survey the damage this past week, we sadly found that most of the staghorn colonies had been smashed to bits. Fortunately, many of the broken pieces of coral survived the maelstrom and have already begun cementing themselves back down to the sea floor and developing healthy new growth tips. While hurricanes can be exceptionally damaging to coral reefs, asexual fragmentation of corals due to these storms is also an important way they can colonize large areas of substrate. As unfortunate as it is to see this damage, based on what we observed post-hurricane offshore Miami Beach, we can expect new colonies to form, and thickets of these endangered corals will return once again.
We are psyched to share that Colin provided the spoken word intro to the song ‘Coral Lords’ from Animal Collective member Avey Tare‘s beautiful new album, Eucalyptus. The passage reads:
“Corals were the first timekeepers of Planet Earth. For more than half a billion years, their internal clocks have been synchronized with the sun and the moon. However, it would take life several hundred million years of further evolution before finally crawling out of from beneath the liquid lens of the ocean and into the open air where it would develop the consciousness necessary to ask the question, then the intelligence needed to invent the technology to empirically measure its objective reality. Thus, the purpose of life is to quantify the nature of the cosmos itself. The development of symbiosis between coral and humankind appears as a harbinger for the final stages of life on earth. Our ouroboros is nearly complete.”
