A GoPro attached to the bow of Godzilla, one photograph every sixty seconds, documenting the journey from Obbola to Luleå. Each evening the day's images went through an app I built. The app was not looking for birds. It was using them to read the water, the place, its surroundings, the atmosphere.
The app runs an AI model, prompted with the data and behavioural traits of a Diver, the birds known in North America as Loons. Divers hunt by sight, underwater. They can only catch fish they can see, which means a diving bird is already telling you something exact about that column of water: how clear it is, how deep the herring are sitting, whether engine noise has scarred everything off, whether the gillnets have cleared the margins. Where a bird settles, how long it stays, whether it dives or moves on, all are a response to certain conditions.
So the app was built to treat the bird's experience as an instrument and the sea as the subject. Not “there is a Diver”, but what does a Diver being here, or not, tell me about this water.
In other words: we are not the bird. We can never understand its perspective. But we can learn from it.
That said, most of the readings in this log use the words absence and displaced.
The water was empty because of the time of year. Forty to fifty thousand Divers cross the Kvarken every spring, but the passage ends in the first days of June, and by the time we sailed the birds were inland on bog pools, sitting on eggs.
Then there is the boat. Divers are among the most easily disturbed seabirds in northern Europe; they leave at around seven hundred and fifty metres, long before you would pick them up from the bow. Anything out there had seen us and gone before the shutter opened. Some of that empty water is ours.
My intention was never to create a poetic project without rigour. I see it as the starting point for a series of works about how observation passes between human, animal and machine, and what survives the handover.
This project was made during Imagining Godzilla, an artist residency aboard the sailing catamaran Godzilla run by Merja Puustinen and Andy Best, a platform for short-term, semi-residential art-research projects investigating the environmental challenges facing the Baltic Sea. This leg, Obbola to Luleå, was part of the residency's 2026 tour of the northern Gulf of Bothnia, supported by Nordic Culture Point and the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture.
The reading app that generates these entries, its narration, and this website were built with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. The field capture, the observations, and the writing are mine.