In the late 1980s and early 1990s, marine researchers heard a whale song which did not resemble any other whale’s voice, in the north east of the Pacific Ocean. They discovered that that whale they had never seen was making a rather loud sound, and they thought that it should have been a crossbred whale.Oceanologists have watched the whale for more than 20 years and found that all other whales in the ocean communicate with each other in the range of 17-18 hertz, but the sound of this different species is 52 hertz (52 hz). For this reason, at first, they have thought that this whale called 52 Hertz had a sickness such as deafness, but after 20 years of observation, they have found that the sound came out of loneliness. Because, while all other species communicate in a specific sound velocity among each other, 52 Hertz was singing out loud as can be heard by humans, and remained unnoticed by sea creatures. The fact that it has never been out of the Pacific for more than 20 years shows that it is healthy, it has been not found whether it is a different species, a hybrid fish or the last member of its own species. Thereupon, it was believed to be a blue or humpback whale, however, as a result of conducted researches, it was decided to call the creature 52 Hertz whale.Research has proven that the loud voice of the 52 Hertz has no harm for itself, other than hindering the whale from joining other fish during the migration due to lack of communication, and it has been also observed that its voice has matured since the 1990s. http://birgunbiryerde.blogspot.com/2014/08/pasifikte-yalnz-balina-52-hertz.html (04.06.2018)
In the light of all this information, the whale has been declared to be the loneliest animal in the world. Dedicated to this whale, the performance “I’m Here” was delivered in the calm waters of YasonBurnu, in Ordu which is the city the artist was born and raised. The artist who identifies the whale’s loneliness with the loneness of his own biological existence, delivers his performance by jumping over the sea 53 times in order to establish a communication with the whale in a vocalic and kinetic action. In the performance, 53 different water halos with a diameter of approximately 150 meters are intertwined by a continuous jumping movement.Apart from the first-hand experience of the singularity and loneliness of the 52-Hertz whale, in this performance, the artist’s own body transforms into a way of transmitting the signal, conveying the message, other than regular communication channels of the human structure we belong until this time, such as “reading and writing”; and it creates a kind of way of saying I’m Here. This is just the way that the Whale says ‘I’m here’ with its audio-frequency. In the performance, there is a state of hope; with the continuous and neat tempo of the act, the artist rhythmically maintains his motion with the end of reaching out a living creature and communicate with it through the frequencies. The performance also expresses the loneliness of the artist as an individual due to its singularity at the stages of sensing and producing.
