The Nereida Capsule

Musician, researcher, artist, iridologist, herbalist, and inventor Ariel Guzik’s Nereida Capsule (2015) is an instrument designed to search for communication with cetaceans. It materializes an intention of encounter with inhabitants of the sea, free from domination and devoid of utilitarian or scientific research interests.

For thirty years, Guzik has explored physics, mechanics, electricity, and magnetism with his Laboratory for Research on Resonance and Expression of Nature, leading to the invention of mechanisms that give nature a voice through music. Rather than intending to decipher and rationalize phenomena of alterity that lie beyond human comprehension, Guzik’s research is focused on making the natural world perceptible through the senses in all of its mystery.

The quartz submersible capsule contains a set of extremely tight strings, whose vibrations emit subtle sounds that constitute a gestural signal before the sonic gaze of marine mammals. Previous version of Nereida, and some other instruments of the same family, have been taken to the waters off the coasts of Baja California, Costa Rica, Scotland and India, with the intention of building a horizontal communication bridge between humans and cetaceans.

Guzik’s Nereida is an instrument whose creation responds to a drive for encountering cetaceans as others, bringing about an out-of-time bubble and a space where chant and sonority might be greeted by a ceremonial context, equivalent to an exchange of rhythmical drum beatings in an act of concerted or spontaneous communion.