Through historical photography, documentary film and interviews, LiDAR and photogrammetry, and speculative fictions, the FLIP projects examine the past and future lives of the decomissioned FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), a co-production of the US Navy and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, operating from 1962 through 2020. FLIP provided information about deep wave dynamics sourced through an array of instruments mounted to its very long tail. It rode out the transition from ocean-based observation to computational data trawling at a distance, but its bulky frame was rendered obsolete by underwater autonomous vehicles. Research platform or ship? Both. FLIP is the proverbial duck-rabbit. The research probe that takes up 300 feet of its 355-foot length plunged deep into the sea to take wave readings while the bow rose high into the air as the crew in the compact cabin hurried to accommodate the 90 degree shift, adjusting instruments, bunks, and toilets on their tracks and hinges as walls gradually become floors and life went sideways. Artist Rachel Mayeri, digital media producers Scott McAvoy and Doug Daniels, historian David Serlin, cognitive scientist Deborah Forster and oceanographer Bruce Appelgate are the research group tracking the long tail of FLIP with input from vessel veterans Rob Pinkel, John Hildebrand, and Bill Gaines. They take up FLIP as a vehicle for thinking about historical, physical and cognitive (dis)orientations, and about how life at sea upends normative ideas about ways of knowing and being with the ocean in the past and into the future, above water and below.
Background: Early production frame from LiDAR imaging of FLIP by Scott McAvoy and Doug Daniels with Jess Ashook, Deborah Forster, and Joe Riley.
