Undercurrent: Actress

Undercurrent: The Black (Kuroshio) Current is an interactive music video for the electronic musician Actress that highlights human-made dangers facing the deep ocean. The project was featured as a web browser-based experience and a physical video installation in Brooklyn, New York as part of the Undercurrent immersive exhibition. Partnered with Ocean Conservancy, the Undercurrent hired Glowbox provided software development and technical direction to illustrate Actress’s original soundscape to bring attention to the urgency of protecting a part of the Earth that humans rarely see with their own eyes.

Requiring only a web browser, The Black (Kuroshio) Current takes users on a journey along a 3D representation of the deepest part of the Earth’s ocean floor: the Kuroshio current near the coast of Japan. Guided by Actress’s AI voice synthesis tool, they encounter distinct story moments, including an attack of sonic pollution from surface vessels that disrupts marine life communications, deep sea mining that harvests rare earth minerals from hydrovents teeming with life, and a cloud of microplastic pollution that poisons deep sea fauna. Users may click and drag their mouse to adjust the first-person camera’s view of the environment. At any point in the experience, they can click on two buttons on the heads-up display overlaid on the first-person camera to switch to two secondary views that provide wider context for the experience: A scrolling 3D topographic relief map of their location on the ocean floor and a satellite view of that location that visualizes ocean currents with animated particle effects. At the end of the experience, users find refuge in a peaceful eddy, where they are presented with a link to Ocean Conservancy’s website where they can take action to protect the Kuroshio Current.

Glowbox provided technical strategy, software development, and look development following creative direction from the client to help realize this project. We made a heightmap using GEBCO’s topographical data from the Okinawa Trough and QGIS software to create a 3D model of the ocean floor that was rooted in reality. We drew from scientific illustrations of underwater sound waves to illustrate the abstract concept of noise pollution, animating gradients as repeating concentric spheres. In order to rapidly iterate on the project’s visual design, we developed a workflow that allowed the near-instant export of 3D data between the Blender design environment and the Three.js deployment environment. This workflow also kept the file size for the final experience down to just 29 MB.

Undercurrent: The Black (Kuroshio) Current is available to audiences on their home computers at the Undercurrent website. An immersive installation featuring video captures of the project’s three distinct views was exhibited as part of the Undercurrent event September 9 through 26, 2021 in Brooklyn, New York.