Fluid Futures is an immersive waterfront installation created by Ant Nevin in collaboration with Earth Sciences New Zealand (NIWA) scientist Dr. Antonia Cristi. The project visualises future microscopic marine life, speculating on how microalgae might evolve in the near, far and very far futures.
April 11–18, 2026
5:30–9:30 PM.
Kumototo Plaza (by the Nga Kina)
Wellington.
Did you realise that every second breath you take comes from phytoplankton rather than forests?
Half the oxygen we breath comes from photosynthesis taking place by microalgae in the waters of every ocean on Earth.
They've been doing this for two billion years,and the changing oceans aren't ending that; they're changing what the organisms have to become to continue doing it.
Phytoplankton have survived every mass extinction on Earth. Five of them. Each time the oceans changed —temperature, chemistry, acidity — they mutated into forms capable of surviving conditions the previous generation couldn't.
They're doing it again.
But you can't see it happening.
A single phytoplankton is invisible to the naked eye, and the changes play out across generations too compressed and too numerous for direct observation. But the mutations are real: shifts in shell structure, how they respond to heat, in chemical signaling, in which species dominate and which disappear are happening right now in the water off this coastline.
Fluid Futures uses real data from Wellington to Antarctica to speculate on what phytoplankton might become in the near, far, and very far futures in the face of a changing marine environment.
Projected as scientifically informed speculative organisms across near futures (2050), far futures (2150), and very far futures (2320).
Kumototo Plaza April 11-18
The accompanying soundtrack extends the installation's exploration of evolution and transformation within speculative ecologies.
Underpinned by the warmth of human choral voices, familiar, emotionally resonant, and deeply expressive, the soundscape gradually dissolves into abstraction. Voices stretch, distort, and merge with electronic textures, reflecting both the persistence and fragility of human presence.
As harmonies warp into unrecognisable forms, they echo the possibilities of evolution, extinction, and beyond. The result is a haunting auditory journey through time, an elegy and a meditation on what it means to evolve beyond our own species.
