Olafur Eliasson turned an Amsterdam aquarium rotunda into the deep sea

Less than 0.001 percent of the deep seafloor has been glimpsed firsthand; the installation asks visitors to construct that unseen world from sound, touch and falling light.

Look up: dim LED 'marine snow' falls from the ceiling while ocean recordings play as sound waves you feel through a domed floor.

A continuous 12-minute composition descends through six sonic layers — cracking glaciers, shipping signals, whale songs, hydrothermal vents — built from 55 authentic recordings sourced from NIOZ and NOAA archives, played through 4DSOUND technology, custom subwoofers and floor transducers under a shallow dome. Overhead, an LED grid ripples like the 'marine snow' of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us.

Open to visitors inside the ARTIS-Aquarium rotunda, included with a standard zoo admission ticket.

In the rotunda of Amsterdam's historic ARTIS-Aquarium, Olafur Eliasson's installation 'Deep seeing currents' inverts the usual deep-sea fantasy: instead of staring down into a dark abyss, visitors look up. A black curtain leads them into darkening space, dim flashing lights fall overhead like marine snow — the organic debris that carries carbon to the ocean floor — and a spatial soundscape reverberates through the body via subwoofers and transducers hidden beneath a slightly domed floor.

The 12-minute composition moves through six sonic layers, from the sharp cracking of glaciers through human shipping signals and whale songs down to hydrothermal vents. Eliasson sourced 55 authentic recordings from scientific archives including the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and NOAA. The marine-snow motif borrows from marine biologist Rachel Carson's 1951 book The Sea Around Us, used as an invitation to humility about ecosystems entirely beyond human sight.

Eliasson framed the work as a question about modern perception: are we passively consuming experiences or actively producing them? By dampening visual input, the piece becomes what the artist calls a sensory microscope — visitors navigate the unknown through sound, touch and physical presence, with the freedom to exit at any point if the darkness becomes overwhelming.

The rotunda's curved, enclosed darkness was treated as an instrument rather than a gallery — the architecture does the descension.

Real archive recordings instead of composed sound anchor the imaginary descent in scientific fact.

The floor turns hearing into touch, so the deep sea is something the body registers, not just an image.

Carson's marine snow gives the falling light a concrete ecological referent rather than abstract atmosphere.

Immersion beats depiction: to show a place no camera has reached, rebuild its darkness, pressure and sound — and let visitors assemble the picture themselves.

The installation is now open in the ARTIS-Aquarium rotunda, with entry included in a standard ARTIS Zoo ticket — reaching regular zoo visitors as well as art audiences.