Brief description of how the proposed work relates to your overall practice; and the relevant themes, techniques, aesthetic and cultural concerns that you plan to explore:

My creative practise exists to further human knowledge of nature through exploring the beauty and quirks of aquatic life.

Themes:
1) Biodiversity of Indigenous Creek Fish. These are fish that sometimes live in extremely remote, hostile environments, such as very hot or freezing cold weather, or very low amounts of water, to high salt contents.
Their colours make them biodiverse and interesting from an artistic standpoint, and also scientifically.
With new ways of looking at data, in this case, pictures we can morph, we can creatively visualize evolution in a way never seen before. This can be done by morphing the relevant families together, such as Batesii with Bualanum(see supporting material). Doing this shows they might have had a common ancestor, at one time before they split and evolved into their respective species.
2) Exploring Extinction. We can't save all of these fish from extinction. We can try to help, specifically through shareable media which educates the public on the topic of endangered fish and extinction.

200 million years ago shore-fish left the marine water and began to occupy the landmass of the super-continent Pangaea. Over the next 50 million years Pangaea broke up and became the modern world. The highly adaptable Killifish being forced to evolve to new post-breakup environments after a few more million years, isolated populations gave rise to a myriad of colours and patterns that would rival the most colourful marine fish. In our work, we had discovered a new physical metric based on some markings that are common to nearly all fish but have been thus far overlooked, and may explain the evolutionary path at work here, that caused the rise in the number of Cyprinodon morphotypes producing a family with the greatest diversity in colours and colour patterns of any family of fish anywhere. with the use of this new findings, we hypothesize and illustrate some possible ancestors and missing links that will reduce the number of unknowns in the phylogenic trees - an important step for determining extinct, endangered, and threatened species.
Techniques:

1)Exploring a new technique of content production which converts an image database into a Morph video format; these videos will help visualise how changes happen in a way that other creative mediums can't.

For example, Killi Photo 1 merges into Killi Photo 2, representing species 1 and species 2. Using various methods to cause image morphing, one fish visually becomes a different fish.

The resulting morph videos are a valuable asset to use both on the curated website, and to incite interest from wider audiences. The public hasn't seen evolution this way before, and visually this a simple way to explain the concept. I have tested this technique to satisfaction using 1 family of fish in a demo, see 'Batesii x Bualanum".

Its a special way of looking at evolution, which I am in a unique position to complete the task.

Aesthetic: Exploring the morphology of evolution in videos detailing the "red band". The red band is significant because its the first pattern that evolved on fish.

Scientists have spent decades trying to understand this family of fishes and either overlooked or not understood the red markings near the throat of these fish. These markings can be found in other family of fish and in fact showed up long before fish had evolved from eel and worm-like creatures. the nature and shape of these carmine vermiform markings, which were once straight lines, indicates how much of a change there has been because of years of evolution but also provides some semblance of a time scale. We postulate it is possible to tell where on the evolutionary time scale any of these fishes are because of these markings.

Thus it's an overlooked aesthetic concern that may provide a big clue to the long term family history of these fishes which has been alluding scientist for over a 100 years.

Once this aesthetic is explored in detail, it may add a new tool to the arsenal available to the taxonomist who in turn

We hope these videos inspire the public with the beauty of these creatures, to learn about and help conserve the species.
Cultural Concerns We Intend To Explore:
Extinction and social media awareness. How does social media affect fish species and their data collection?
Can endangered fish benefit from this?
Shareable video media can educate the public on the topic of endangered fish and extinction.
We do this by creating a web-interactive media forum. This morph videos posted on the web-page, when finished are shared on social media, for input, comments, feedback, discussion, and general education, hopefully gaining public insight into the cause for rare & endangered fish.
The dynamic between the scientific members and non-scientific members of the Killifish community is evident on social media groups. They both are involved in their own ways, and each are just as important. For example:
On any average day, a collector visits a remote region of a foreign country, say West Africa in the jungle. They travel for 8 hours in a car on bumpy unpaved roads to get to an even more remote area. There's insects, it's hot and humid. They finally stop at a creek; Its a part of the world that looks like no man has ever been there. The collector nets some fish from the river, photographs them in a clear plastic bag, sending the picture to social media groups for identification, on the spot. He will continue the process, saving some fish for samples.
Real-time, on social media, the pictures are discussed with hobbyists, breeders and ichthyologists. They count fin rays, scales, bands of colour in order to identify the specimen. A new species found and recorded, all done in a few hours.

Without the large number of photos obtained and discussed on social media, creating the taxonomy for the species might have been impossible. Making it easier and quicker, this speedy tactic helps not only fish curators, but also the fish themselves.

In this way, social media input helps create the Morphology project videos. These videos are an insight into this part of nature, and can only further public understanding and awareness for these little creatures.