Planktonium Live

Planktonium Live is a voyage of discovery to a secret universe, a live performance with the smallest organisms playing the leading role. For Shaping Bonds Dutch photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken collaborates with composer and clarinetist Jaime Peña whose work explores the poetic potential of everyday sound. Together they create a total experience that immerses the audience in the images and sounds of an underwater world that goes beyond the natural boundaries of our senses.

Microscopic images of various species of plankton show an assortment of rotating, crawling, spinning and dancing objects, in all shapes and sizes. Are they molluscs emitting light signals, or are they spaceships, gemstones, human cells? Their beauty appears extraterrestrial, but they are vital to our planet: plankton produces half of all the oxygen on Earth, absorbs large quantities of CO2 and forms the beginning of the food chain. It is now threatened by rising temperatures and ocean acidification.