Oceanic Feeling
Josef Bania & Lion Bischof / Tine Mikkelsen & Tine Mikkelsen / Germany, Denmark & United Kingdom
‘Oceanic Feeling’ is an immersive VR 360 documentary and installation taking viewers on a first-person journey through the four extraordinary metamorphoses of the mysterious European Eel to gain a new perspective on our relationship with the more-than-human world.
‘Oceanic Feeling’ is an immersive journey, presented as both an on-site audiovisual installation and a VR 360 experience, inviting viewers along on the great migration of the mysterious and critically endangered European Eel. The story follows the eels through their four extraordinary metamorphoses, beginning in their edenic ocean birthplace, through the murky waters of industrialisation, into a contemporary world characterised by pathological attitudes towards the more-than-human world, and finally upwards into a bright, speculative future.
First-person eel perspective is combined with found materials, culminating in an encounter with the voice of a deepfake Sigmund Freud, whose frustrated and failed attempts to locate eels’ reproductive organs arguably coloured his perception of the world. Psychoanalytic thought informs the narrative but is challenged by contemporary voices, who see in Freud’s ideas a familiar tendency towards individualistic, neoliberal modes of thinking. These voices, along with the extraordinary lives and extreme adaptations of the eels themselves, offer new paradigms fit for an age of climate crisis, mass extinction and collective psychological dysfunction.
