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.
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.
Update 4/29/19: Watch the full Q & A below:
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.
Learn more about Tangerine Reef in interviews with ARTnews, the Washington Post, & Billboard.
Read reviews from Pitchfork, AllMusic, & PopMatters.
Dive deeper into the world of Tangerine Reef before the full audiovisual album is released on August 17th.
Learn about the origins of Tangerine Reef in interviews with Rolling Stone & the Miami New Times.
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 Reef website.
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.
Check out photosets from the live performance of Tangerine Reef via Brooklyn Vegan & The Line of Best Fit.
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.
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.”
Thanks to everyone that attended the Coral Orgy this past Friday, February 24th at the New World Center on Miami Beach. Coral Orgy was a site-specific audiovisual collaboration by Coral Morphologic and Animal Collective on the cosmic secrets behind the sexual reproduction of corals. Coral Morphologic proposes that unlocking the secrets of coral reproduction is a culminating achievement in humankind’s quest for colonization of planet Earth, and a first step towards restoring a healthy biosphere.
Animal Collective performed an hour of new music inspired by the reefs while Coral Morphologic projections painted a cosmic world of fluorescent coral inside the Frank Gehry-designed concert hall.
We are grateful to have been able to include footage of one of the first predicted stony coral spawns in captivity from Project Coral at the Horniman Museum. This advancement in coral reproduction (led by aquarist Jamie Craggs) is evidence that humanity is finally crossing this all-important milestone at just the critical juncture when the world’s coral reefs are ailing most. We are proud to support the work of SECORE and the Coral Restoration Foundation, and were thrilled to be able to display their footage of corals spawning in nature across the New World Center’s 7,000 square foot video projection wall in SoundScape Park prior to the main event.
On February 24th 2017, Coral Morphologic presents Coral Orgy, a collaborative site specific performance with Animal Collective at the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center on Miami Beach. Coral Orgy is an audiovisual meditation on the secrets behind the sexual reproduction of corals, and an invocation towards the human quest of unlocking them. Animal Collective will perform an hour of new music inspired by the reefs while Coral Morphologic projects a cosmic world of fluorescent coral inside the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center performance using its twelve 4k projectors to map all five of Gehry’s sails. Before the performance, Coral Morphologic films will play outside on the 7,000 square foot projection wall in SoundScape Park.
Tickets on sale Tuesday, February 7th via https://coralorgy.frontgatetickets.com
Through this event, Coral Morphologic and Animal Collective aim to highlight the groundbreaking scientific work done on coral reproduction by the non-profits Coral Restoration Foundation (USA), SECORE (GER), and Project Coral (UK).
It’s a treat to share Flower Garden Banks, an Animal Collective x Coral Morphologic collaboration featuring “Michael, Remember (Jam May 12, 2015)”, the first warm-up jam for Animal Collective upon getting together to practice for the first time in a year and a half. It features Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist, and was recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, NC. The accompanying underwater video was recorded in July 2014 within the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary over two nights by Colin, with additional camera and lighting by Deakin and Geologist of Animal Collective. The raw jam and video were later shared, and the resulting video was edited by Jared.
The Flower Garden Banks are located about 100 miles offshore Galveston, Texas in the Gulf of Mexico and are the northernmost coral reef formations in the continental United States. The reef begins at about 60’ deep and is characterized by massive brain coral heads and a lack of branching or soft corals. The corals were filmed with special blue wavelength lights and filters that capture the natural fluorescence of the colonies. While the evolutionary purpose that this fluorescence serves corals is still not fully understood, the directed application of the corals’ fluorescent proteins by geneticists was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 by serving to accelerate (and literally illuminate) the field of genetics and biochemistry.
Coral Morphologic is proud to announce the digital release of the remixed and remastered Natural History Redux today, March 6, 2014. NHR compiles our original Natural History series of videos (that were previous only available online individually in 720p) into a digital 1080p collector’s edition. NHR sees these 23 films hypnotically datamoshed together into a half-hour odyssey of the sea. Watch the official film free above, @ https://vimeo.com/showcase/naturalhistoryredux, or purchase the film @ coralmorphologic.bigcartel.com/product/natural-history-redux-digital-hd-film
The release of Natural History Redux represents the closing of the early chapters of Coral Morphologic. The ‘Natural History’ series represents our early ‘demos’, as the acquisition of the landmark Canon 5D Mark II in 2009 had suddenly made high-definition macro videography an affordable prospect for us. At that time we were still based out of our original home-based lab, where we made do with miniaturized aquarium sets that we hand-crafted in DIY spirit, challenging ourselves to make living portraits of our local invertebrate marine life. Colin did the filming, and J.D. composed original soundtracks (except ‘Man O War’ which was scored by Animal Collective’s Geologist) to accompany each film. We charged ourselves to film and release a new portrait every week on this blog, which for the most part we delivered under self-imposed Monday morning deadlines. After filming ‘Man O War’ we found ourselves in a position where we felt constrained by our home-based lab, and took the gamble to move into a dedicated facility where we could expand our vision. It would be another two years before we had the time or resources to film anything new (the new Lab was considerably more expensive to set up and operate). 3 years later, we are pleased to offer a remixed and remastered compilation of these films as an audio-visual album. Enjoy!
Coral Morphologic is proud to announce the digital release of the remixed and remastered Natural History Redux this Thursday, March 6, 2014. NHR compiles our original 23 ‘Natural History’ videos (that were previous only available online individually in 720p) into a digital 1080p collector’s edition.
We are psyched to share that a selection of our Natural History films will screen on ATP TV during this upcoming weekend’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival as curated by Animal Collective, in Minehead, UK. This will be the first international exhibition of our work; read more about the festival here.
‘Man O War’
Physalia physalis
Film and Aquarium: Coral Morphologic
Original Soundtrack: Geologist
In this special installment of our Natural History film series, Geologist soundtracks a macroscopic view of a Portuguese man-o-war’s beautiful, yet highly venomous tentacles.
The man-o-war is often mistaken as a jellyfish, but this is not the case. It does not swim, but is instead propelled by the winds, tides and currents across the ocean’s surface. In fact, a man-o-war is not even a single organism, but an entire colony of organisms called siphonophores, that live together as a singular unit. They are found floating across all of the world’s tropical and subtropical oceans. Even more impressive is that the man-o-war colony is comprised of four different types of polyps, called zooids, that each serve a different purpose to the overall functioning of the colony.
