Can a human body—or its unwanted leaking substance—namely tears—sustain a new marine ecosystem, and in that way help us heal our relationship with endangered oceans? In Autumn 2019 I lost three people who were close to me. The world’s governments declared an environmental emergency and environmental anxiety has been recognized as a mental health condition. Then the pandemic begun and the anxiety became unbearable, induced by news headlines delivered to my social media by ever-so-helpful algorithms.  

While grieving, I cried a lot. Then I started using tears as a way to relieve and manage my anxiety. I had so many tears so that I started to collect them. Oceans have always played an extremely important part in my life and so I asked myself whether I could use my tears to create a mini ocean with this liquid. 

What followed was 18 months research combining bio-art and data gathering, machine learning and bot programming, a tool for tears harvesting making and performance designing exploring the composition of human tears, their nutritional values for basic marine organisms, reasons for crying, crying stimuli, and whether in our increasingly digital life there is a space for tears and grief—and what all of that means for the empathy towards the system which we are part of.  

The result—How to Make an Ocean— is an experience made of several parts: 1) a collection of mini oceans made out of my tears and the tears of participants in my performances 2) a Moirologist bot—Moirologist being a job from the past—a professional crier helping to shed tears. Here it is in the form of AI—a selection of videos with music—selected for viewing based on its assessment of the environmental news headlines 3) a lab with tools to collect tears and make a mini ocean and 4) a meditative workshop-performance during which I, together with the Moirologist Bot, guide the audience through a number of actions to make them cry and thus contribute to the collection of mini marine eco-systems.