Bergenhus, Norway
The Changing Ocean
A 360° installation that takes you from a Bergen city fjord to 3,000 metres deep in the ocean and back — cold-water coral, trawl scars, sleeping sperm whales — built entirely from real expedition data.
Created for and owned by Bergen Aquarium, Norway, where it has been a permanent exhibit since May 2024. Concept, direction and project lead: Sølve Jozeph Westli. CGI production: Rebel Unit, Bergen. You sit in the dark and the ocean closes over you. The journey starts in the fjord outside Bergen, crosses the continental shelf, and keeps going down — past cold-water coral reefs, past a bottom trawler working across the seabed, down into water no sunlight has ever reached — before rising back up through the water column, past sleeping sperm whales and singing humpbacks. Nothing here is dramatised. Every environment is reconstructed from real expedition data gathered by the Institute of Marine Research and the University of Bergen. The point of building it in CGI rather than filming it is that a camera at that depth sees perhaps ten metres in a cone of artificial light. A reconstruction can show the whole thing: the shape of an entire hydrothermal vent field, or that sperm whale hanging vertically in water which goes on far past the reach of any lamp. The sound is 9.1.4-channel surround, composed entirely from recordings of the real ocean — including the noise we put into it. An official IOC/UNESCO Ocean Decade Activity. Venue: Akvariet i Bergen, Nordnesbakken 4, 5005 Bergen, Norway Running time: 16 minutes Tickets: see www.akvariet.no Accessibility: seated; step-free access
Audience Role
The audience sits in a darkened room while the ocean is projected around them, and watches. There is no interaction, no participation and no performers — the role is closer to that of a passenger on a dive than an audience at a show. Visitors arrive and leave freely during aquarium opening hours and may enter part-way through the 16-minute cycle.
Ages: All ages
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About Aurora Vortex AS
Aurora Vortex AS — Bergen, Norway Aurora Vortex builds immersive experiences that put people inside ocean science. The studio works from real research — expedition data, ROV surveys, seabed mapping, hydrophone recordings — and reconstructs what the instruments recorded but no camera could ever capture. An ROV light reaches about ten metres. A 360° camera films what it happens to get. Building in CGI from survey data instead means you can turn the light on in the deep ocean and show what was actually there. Founded in 2025 by Sølve Jozeph Westli, an immersive science communicator with a background in composition, exhibition design and museum AV. Westli was project lead on The Changing Ocean, the permanent 360° installation at Akvariet i Bergen, and on The Unknown Land at the University Museum of Bergen. Aurora Vortex now develops touring and pop-up formats of this work, including a VR edition presented at the BBNJ Symposium in Rio de Janeiro and the Windermere Science Festival in the UK.