“corzee mol o emarlm eszee … tsnyora snook snay nornse … forcanlows sekmalafair nischniss seconlyaire”
Although Physalia, the Portuguese Man O’ War, with its gas-filled float and tentacles bearing venomous stings, resembles a jellyfish, “like all siphonophores, it is a colonial organism made up of smaller units called zooids.” (Quoted from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physalia)
“Physalia” is derived from a Latin word meaning “bubble” or “bladder”. Its stings (nematocysts) create intense burning pain and its neurotoxins can cause paralysis.
The “Man O’ War” was a sailing vessel developed by the Portuguese in the 16th Century as a powerful warship, heavily armed with cannons. They were widely used by other European colonialists, including the British, French, Spanish and Dutch, well into the 19th Century. The strength of the Portuguese navy was instrumental in acquiring and maintaining its colonial empire from the 15th Century until the 20th Century when the last remnants of the empire were decolonised.
Physalia is highly successful organism, widespread across the world’s oceans. Nevertheless, its environment is under increasing threat from pollution and climate change. Its potent armoury of highly toxic stings is no match for this type of attack. Perhaps new forms of cryptic colonial zooids may evolve to reverse the damage… If they had the words, what would they tell us?
Making Physalia
All the spoken text and its on-screen transcription is derived from mirror images, reversals and reflections of the Wikipedia quote. I reversed the quote in two different ways:
(1) record the sentence spoken by a text-to-voice reader, and then reverse the audio.
(2) reverse the order of the letters in the sentence and record the text-to-voice reader to speaking the reversed letter order.
Each of these audio files was cut up into its syllables or phonemes, and the volume envelopes and formant structures or each phoneme were edited to make them sound more like natural language. Next, I sequenced them to fit with the backing music and changed the pitch and formant structure of some sections to create additional voices.
The hardest part of the whole process was transcribing this new “language” back into readable text on screen! The different fonts on screen indicate the different voices.
I have used invented or code-based languages before on my videos, eg The Ferrovores. They have all followed their own internally consistent grammatical rules and meanings. But in Physalia, the “language” is purely phonetic and has no underlying structure or meaning, other than what was in the source sentence.
The biomorphic creatures in the video are not real Physalia, not least because I didn’t have any footage I could use. Instead, the Physalia biomorphs were variously constructed from Particle Illusion (Boris FX), coralline red algae, Muntrie flowers and Eucalypt flowers. Very few people have seen Physalia out at sea (I have a few times!) so using imaginary shapes seemed fitting.
None of the scenes in the video is real: all have been composited and animated from multiple sources. Primary source locations include Tarndanya / Adelaide CBD and parklands, Karrawirra Pari / River Torrens, Yertabulti / Port Adelaide, Kuarka-dorla / Anglesea River, and Kaarta Gar-up / Kings Park, Perth, on the unceded lands of the Kaurna, Wadawurrung and Nyoongar peoples, respectively. Many of the buildings illustrated here date back to colonial 19th Century Australia.
I’ve been amazed and delighted that Physalia has had many screenings around the world and has won internationals awards, including:
• Winner, Best Short Experimental Film, Newcastle International Short Film Festival (Newcastle, Australia, November, 2024);
• Winner, Staff Favorite, Another Hole In The Head – Warped Dimension 5 (on-line, San Francisco, June 2024);
• Jury Special Mention, Pebbles Underground Film and Video Art – Summer 2024 (on-line, Canada, June 2024 / January 2025).