Cast Ashore: Sensory Interactions with Sea-derived Matter

Cast Ashore presents two interactive artefacts—Agar Piano and Sea Tile—that invite audiences to touch, see, and hear an artistic reflection on the porous boundaries between humans, nonhumans, technology, and the vital aquatic world. These artefacts encourage playful, sensorial engagement with sea-derived materials— often cast ashore by the ebbing and flowing of tides — foregrounding their ecological origins, lifecycles, and entanglements with more-than-human agencies. Developed through a collaborative practice between a digital media PhD researcher and a computer scientist, this work emerged from mutual curiosity to combine biomaterials and interaction in an open-access citizen science lab and makerspace. Drawing on the Arts of Noticing, the first author engaged in a reflective making practice1 that underpins the design of these interactive objects. These artefacts celebrate the vitality and agency of once-living sea-derived matter, prompting curiosity about where these materials come from, how they transform, and what kinds of stories they might tell.