How to Find the Soul of a Sailor
By Kasia Molga
Image credit: 'How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' by Kasia Molga
In a collection of weathered sailing diaries, artist Kasia Molga found more than just memories of her father – she discovered a baseline for measuring how profoundly our oceans are changing. Molga takes her late father's maritime journals – precise records of waves, winds and weather from 1984 – and uses artificial intelligence to imagine how he might describe those same seas in 2084. 'How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' emerges as both a memorial and a prophecy – a daughter's attempt to hear her father's voice echo across a century of environmental change.
Concept and vision
The project begins with an intimate archive: the meticulously kept diaries of Molga's late father, Tadeusz, documenting his life as a sailor and the time he spent together with Molga at sea. Fifteen years after his passing, Molga turned to The New Real Observatory platform to explore how his words might evolve in response to changing oceanic conditions. She chose 2084 as her target – exactly 100 years after her father began his diaries – creating a century-spanning bridge between personal memory and planetary change.
Technical journey
Molga's approach to the material is multi-layered. After transcribing her father's diaries, she used The New Real Observatory platform's Word2Vec model to create a mathematical space of word associations based on her fathers’ words, both in native Polish, as well as translated to English. Focusing particularly on terms related to ocean, wind and waves, she used the platform's climate modeling tools to guide a linguistic transformation, by metaphorically projecting the diary entries into the future.
Using the platform's most pessimistic climate projections for 2084, she explored how changes in temperature, wind and precipitation might transform the language of seafaring. She moved through the word-association space proportionally to projected environmental changes, discovering new linguistic combinations that reflected both climate transformation and her father's original voice.
Image credit: 'How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' by Kasia Molga
The work
The resulting piece operates as both personal memorial and environmental speculation. Molga used the AI-generated word associations as prompts to craft new diary entries for a week in 2084, creating a bilingual narrative in both English and Polish. These entries are presented alongside original and AI-generated imagery, creating an immersive environment that places viewers on the bridge of a ship, surrounded by synthetic projections of future seas.
Significance
'How to Find the Soul of a Sailor' demonstrates a profound new approach to both environmental storytelling and AI-human collaboration. By using climate projections to transform a personal narrative, Molga creates an emotionally resonant way to engage with environmental change.
The project shows how machine learning can help us navigate between past and future, personal and planetary, memory and speculation. It stands as both a daughter's tribute to her father and a meditation on how environmental change might transform the very language we use to describe our relationship with the sea.
Footnotes
The New Real Observatory is part of The New Real, a partnership between University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s Festivals and The Alan Turing Institute. Featured artists Adam Harvey, Inés Cámara Leret, Keziah MacNeill, Alex Fefegha.
Supported by UK Research and Innovation (EPSRC, AHRC), Towards Turing 2.0, Creative Scotland, Scottish AI Alliance, and the Data-Driven Innovation Programme.
'How to Find the Soul of a Sailor’ was commissioned as a project of The New Real and the Scottish AI Alliance as part of ‘Uncanny Machines’, and was first exhibited at Inspace Gallery Edinburgh in December 2024.
Links
Artist bio
Kasia Molga (UK/PL) has refused to be labelled – design fusionist, artist, environmentalist, creative coder and technologist who for over a decade has sought ways of collaboration with nature, predominantly focusing on the ever-changing human relation to and perception of the natural environment and fellow ‘earthlings’. Her award winning work has been exhibited worldwide (i,e. Ars Electronica, Tate Modern, MIS (BR), Centre Pompidou and more). Kasia has taken part in many international art & science residencies and has lectured and mentored regularly in the EU and UK. An affinity with the ocean is evident in Kasia’s work, born from her time growing up on merchant navy vessels with her sailor father, and she is the proud holder of a diving licence.
Cite as: Kasia Molga (2025). ‘How to Find the Soul of a Sailor.’ The New Real Magazine, Edition Two. pp 30-32. www.newreal.cc/magazine-edition-two/how-to-find-the-soul-of-a-sailor
