Can a human body – or its unwanted byproducts – namely tears – sustain a new marine ecosystem? Can this help us heal our relationship with endangered oceans?

In Autumn 2019 Kasia Molga lost three people close to her. The world’s governments declared an environmental emergency and environmental anxiety was recognised as a mental condition. Then the pandemic began. Mogla’s experience of anxiety became unbearable, stoked by news headlines delivered via social media by ever-so-helpful algorithms.

While grieving, she cried a lot. Crying then became a way to relieve and manage her anxiety. She had so many tears that she began collecting them. Oceans have always played an extremely important part in her life so she asked herself whether she could use her tears to create a mini-ocean.

What followed was 18 months of research, combining bio-art and data gathering, machine learning and bot programming. She developed tools for harvesting tears, created a performance/video and explored the composition of human tears, their nutritional value for basic marine organisms. She also looked at different reasons for crying, crying stimuli and whether in our increasingly digital life there is a space for tears and grief – and what all that means for the empathy towards the system which we are part of.

The result – How to Make an Ocean – is an experience made of a few parts:
1) A collection of framed mini-oceans made out of her tears and tears of participants of her performances.
2) A Moirologist bot – an AI system designed to help induce tears through a series of videos and music, selected for viewing based on daily environmental news headlines.
3) A lab with tools to collect tears and make a mini-ocean.