Plankton Performance is an ongoing improvised collaboration between plankton scientist Jess Holz and sound artist/composer Senem Pirler in which microscopy, usually a silent and solitary act of looking, becomes a shared audiovisual performance. Its central performers are not human but plankton: microorganisms collected from local waters. For the first performance, at the MIT Museum on September 12, 2025, they came from the Charles River and Boston Harbor.

Working at the microscope, Holz captures the plankton's movements and projects them in real time using a time-lapse exposure technique that "paints" their paths across the screen. Pirler reads these accumulating traces as graphic scores and responds in sound to the plankton's rhythms, textures, and motion. The organisms' movement shapes the improvisation and the decisions both performers make in real time.

Rather than presenting plankton as specimens, Plankton Performance treats them as co-creators. The work reveals their dynamic, searching behaviors and the relationship that forms between them and their human collaborators. Plankton are foundational to Earth's ecosystems and among the most abundant forms of life on the planet, yet they remain invisible to the unaided eye.