The Thinking Ocean (2026)

“Both poetic and visually striking, The Thinking Ocean invites us to rethink our relationship to nature and bodies of water, in particular. Drawing parallels between thinking, consciousness, fluid flows and computation, the work highlights the ‘operating systems’ we share with the natural environment.”

— Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney.

Commissioned by Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website

Explore it live: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/the-thinking-ocean

The Thinking Ocean explores whether natural dynamic systems like oceans, rivers, winds, storms — which according to very recent research could be Turing complete — might themselves be capable of thought. And questions why we propose granting personhood and even consciousness to AI, while overlooking the complex computations already happening in water, air, and other planetary systems. It also highlights that in permanently altering our water systems (which our body is one), we are altering our own greater bodies: a living system so complex and relational that we don’t even understand it; and in doing so diminishing our own consciousness along with it.

Part of the Cosmosapience series, a continuation of the Superradiance project.

Whitney Press Release

Excerpts

The work is an online interactive generative experience, below are some excerpts rendered as video

Play

Background

Recent research has shown that Navier–Stokes equations — which govern the movement of fluids like water and air — are Turing complete, i.e. in principle, fluid flows can perform any computation that a digital computer can.

Building on this, our new project raises the questions: If computation is being taken as a criterion for ‘thinking,‘ or even ‘consciousness,’ then what natural systems might already qualify that we are overlooking?

Why do we grant personhood to AI while denying it to natural systems like rivers, oceans, the atmosphere, and more?

The piece highlights our bias of granting agency or consciousness to machines that mimic human behavior, while overlooking the complex computations happening in natural systems all around us.

Ultimately, this work is a provocation to consider whether natural systems — that are now known to be Turing Complete, such as water and air — might be capable of thought, and if so, how are we altering those systems, those thoughts?

Images

Credits and Acknowledgements

Artists: Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter

Commissioned by Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website

Developed in dialogue with researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s SOARS Lab (Ocean-Atmosphere Research Simulator).

Made with opensource software: threejs (and webgpu)

Info

Medium: Interactive Web, Video, Live Performance; Duration: generative seamless loops or video, variable; Dimensions: variable; Technique: Choreography and dance, poetry, custom software, computer vision and motion tracking, simulation, digital painting, WebGPU, custom software