Black Smoker, 2025

The exhibition Midnight Zone is a sensory passage through regions of the sea that appear opaque or impenetrable to the human animal, a reality seemingly unknowable. Black Smoker invites the audience to enter this realm— laying bare the energetic forces which govern it. In a murky room, where the human eye struggles to adjust, the installation brings together the primordial presence of underwater volcanoes, hydrothermal vents, deep-sea landslides, and the magmatic currents which surge beneath the seafloor once believed to be barren. An auditory and bodily katabasis, this work plunges the visitor into the geological world of the deep, from the unfathomable ranges of the Monterey Submarine Canyons in California to the Axial Seamount volcano, towering on the seafloor off the Oregon coast­line. It stages an encounter not only with the tectonic plates whose drift and violent confrontations shape our planet’s foundation, but with acoustic phenomena conventionally restricted to an abyss beyond our reach. By listening in to a number of deluged voices, from the abyssal plains of the Oahu coast to Italian hydrothermal vent systems in Panarea and beyond, Black Smoker brings these low, often imperceivable frequencies to the surface, made perceptible by the artist through the conception of a multidimensional and haptic sound system.

To compose this experience of a world inundated by immense pressure, searing heat, and shadow, Julian Charrière uses field recordings from deep-sea hydrophones, as well as material from seismic monitoring stations and scientific archives. From crackling exhalations of subterranean gasses to the guttural eruption of rocks and magma from abyssal calde­ras, Black Smoker represents a spatial anomaly, a chamber of submarine resonance, where human timescales give way to the temporality of the Earth itself, forming a parliament of ancient voices that speak to the molten power that still courses through our planet’s stone-set veins. By amplifying this dialogue and com­bining it with the sonification of live data feeds from deep-sea monitoring stations, it bridges the philosophical trench that divides the surface world from the submerged, unearthing rhythm sustained for millennia by deep, unseen and unheard currents flowing beyond human perception.


Credits
Programming and Live Data Sonification: Víctor Mazón Gardoqui
Composition and Spatial Sound Design: Felix Deufel

Acknowledgments
The artist would like to thank the many scientists who contributed
invaluable knowledge and support along the way, including
Aaron Micallef and John Ryan (Monterey Bey Aquarium MBARI);
Susan Casey; Shima Abadi, Joe Dubrey, Deborah Kelley, Orest Kwaka,
Bret Nestor and William Wilcock (University of Washington);
Ocean Observatories Initiative and Ocean Networks Canada.