Step Into
the Ocean

Pilot a submersible through a Malaysian coral reef, free-roaming with a game controller. Scan marine life to unlock a detailed 3D holographic model and the science behind it, then debrief on your mission.

The science underneath is survey work — how a reef gets read species by species, and why that record is the foundation everything else rests on. Visitors tend to arrive seeing a reef as scenery. They leave understanding it as a population that somebody has to go and count.

Explore. Find. Scan. Discover.

An immersive ocean mystery. Players learn how environmental-DNA science reads the invisible genetic traces every marine organism leaves behind in the water — and use it to reveal who is behind an underwater heist.

Every organism sheds genetic material into the water around it. Framing that as a mystery to solve is what makes the underlying idea stick: you can now establish what lives in a stretch of ocean without ever seeing, catching or disturbing a single animal.

Investigate. Compare. Deduce. Solve.

Data from the CTD instrument is visualised as a descent from the twilight zone to the deep seabed. Visitors then discover and embody the thermohaline current, to see what keeps marine life alive in the deep.

A CTD instrument measures conductivity, temperature and depth as it descends, and those three numbers describe how the ocean is layered and how it moves. Embodying a current rather than reading a graph is what makes the point land — the deep sea is not still, and the circulation a visitor briefly stands inside is what carries nutrients downward and regulates climate at the surface.

Move. Disturb. Reveal. Understand.

Visitors collectively restore a dying Indo-Pacific meadow — tapping fish traps into restoration discs, deploying them across the seabed to encourage propagation, and clearing debris in real time. As the meadow heals, dugongs, seahorses and sea turtles return.

Seagrass meadows are nurseries for countless species and among the ocean’s most efficient carbon stores, and the restoration method here is drawn from traditional Tunisian fishing traps rather than invented for a gallery. The meadow only recovers as more visitors join in, so the mechanic carries the lesson: restoration is slow, collective, and works at a scale no one person reaches alone.

Deploy. Clear. Replant. Revive.

Children aged 7–10 step into the performance zone and puppeteer one of three ocean protectors with their own body, tracked in real time, among rotating ocean facts, environments and features such as bubbles, jellyfish and bioluminescence. A companion interactive workbook runs on iPad and Apple Pencil.

For seven to ten year-olds the learning is built on identification rather than instruction. A child moves the animal with their own body, meets the pressures it lives under, and forms an attachment first — which is the order in which caring about something tends to actually happen.

No controller. Just move.

Helium-filled robotic fish move overhead as a single coordinated body, driven by sensors and motors. Visitors change the shape of the swarm simply by moving beneath it, without being told that they can.

Collective behaviour is one of the ocean’s organising principles: vast groups moving in synchrony with no leader and no plan. The work translates ecological data on locomotion and synchronisation into emergent formations you can walk underneath.

A healthy reef crackles, clicks and hums. The work builds on research into acoustic enrichment — the finding that broadcasting the soundscape of a thriving reef beside a degraded one can draw life back to it. In one study on the Great Barrier Reef, fish and other marine organisms returned to damaged coral within forty days, following sound alone.

It belongs to the sunlit shallows, where reef systems are under the most visible pressure and where recovery is still within reach. The work makes an argument that listening is itself a form of restoration.

Sheets and veils of light behave like liquid, bending and folding as visitors move through the space. Nothing is projected onto a surface. The light itself is the material, and the room is the work.

A response to the fragile light conditions of the twilight zone, where the last of the sunlight breaks down and living light takes over. It echoes both bioluminescence and the instability of perception at depth — the sense that what you are seeing cannot quite be trusted.

Whales navigate, hunt and speak to one another through sound, in a world where sight stops being useful. The work translates echolocation and non-human perception into something a visitor can stand inside — hydrophone recordings, whale vocalisations and underwater footage across three channels.

It sits at the point in the descent where light gives out. Below two hundred metres, survival depends on sound, vibration and pressure, in sensory realms far outside human experience. The work asks visitors to perceive the ocean the way its inhabitants do, rather than the way we do.

Underwater recordings carry visitors on a descent made entirely of sound, surfacing marine life that sits wholly beyond the range of human hearing.

The deep ocean is not silent, and this is the listening work for the stretch of the journey where there is nothing left to see. It asks for the kind of sustained attention the deep sea almost never receives.