The secret life of cold-water coral

Colourful flower-like creatures sway in the tides among trumpet fish and seahorses: It was long thought that corals only thrive in the warm waters of the tropics. But their relatives, the so-called cold-water corals, can be found in every ocean of the world. The ancient creatures of the dark deep sea can live for up to 4,000 years and survive at depths of up to 6,000 metres. In other words, some of the cold-water corals living today already existed at the time of the pharaohs. Not only can they tell us an incredible amount about the history of the oceans, they also possess a little-known psychedelic beauty. Unlike their tropical relatives, cold-water corals live without light and without symbiotic algae. Instead, they use their calcareous skeletons to slowly form growing, bizarre landscapes of ornate structures - habitats for thousands of other species, many of which are still unexplored.

In collaboration with the University of California and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in California and Hawaii, the Latin American-Californian multimedia artist Saul Villegas has produced a free, digitally accessible 3D exhibition. Using videos and deep-sea photography, he has created an artistic recreation of the scientific findings. Villegas' motivation: to visualise the abstract nature of the ocean and make the invisible tangible. In the digital exhibition, visitors glide through surreal underwater worlds in which science and art flow seamlessly into one another.

Villegas is convinced that corals offer a narrative of the fusion of past, present and future. For him, the abstract and huge ramifications of the coral colonies are a metaphor. They stand for the invisible and visible existence of countless parallel identities and realities both in our society and our unconscious. The exhibition also stands as a protest: a reminder of hidden worlds that are threatened by deep-sea mining, overfishing and climate change. Villegas sees coral reefs - especially those in the deep sea - as archives of a planetary memory, harbouring clues to geological, biological and human history .