Group Marine - day 4

Yesterday we had Butoh training basically the whole day. Personally I found it relaxing and also very interesting. What seemed to be the main purpose, due to my experience, was experiencing the world with other senses than pure eyesight. It was quite amazing walking around in the Architecture building blindfolded for quite a while, since the other senses became so much more attendant than they usually are. The hearing improved, and feeling the different textures of the walls and floor with ones hand was pure beauty. Also it seemed very possible to sense whether one was in a large or smaller space; both due to sounds, but also due to... the sense of the air? It was a really nice experience.

Today we are working on finishing our presentation posters, and also developing a choreography inspired by our chosen animal; the jellyfish. We have booked a room that we will use during the performance, and are working on putting a video together that we will run during it. In many ways it is an unusual way of working for everyone in the team, but it also feels quite... playful and free? Hopefully it will be fun. 

Also, according to Anna-Maria one of the goals of this performance is to try to gain a deeper understanding of the chosen animal (in our case the jellyfish) through movement. It will be interesting to see if it will deepen our understanding for its biology. 

The added picture is our current version of our first poster, and it aims to describe the moon jellyfish's existance within the ecosystem - the macro scale -, its anatomy, its behaviour and also its movements. It's also this last aspect that we've chosen to pay our main focus to: the movement. 

Interesting enough we found out that except from at many times using the oceans' currents to transport the jellyfish is also the world's most effective swimmer. Also it seems like much of the research done on how it moves have been done in later years; actually mainly during this decade. Before one has just assumed that the jellyfish is just pushing itself forward by filling its bell with water and then pushing it out again - but actually new research shows that it rather pulls itself forward (we have read quite some about it, but is's difficult to grasp). Very interesting and also possibly utterly useful in the technology of tomorrow. 

The video below shows areas of low pressure (blue) and high pressure (red) when the jellyfish swims. This pioneering resarch on the movement of the jellyfish has been done by a team of scientists at Stanford, led by John Dabiri.