Plankton Performance

First performed on September 12, 2025 at the MIT Museum, Plankton Performance is an ongoing improvised collaboration between artist Jess Holz and composer Senem Pirler in which microscopy itself becomes a live performance. The stars of the show are not human performers, but plankton- lively microorganisms collected from the Charles River and Boston Harbor. In this multispecies collaboration, Holz and Pirler aim to highlight how plankton reveal themselves and how their movement can inform improvisation and decision-making in real time. The result is what Holz calls Plankton Painting: an audiovisual canvas a millimeter wide created collaboratively by multitudes of tiny living organisms.