Bishop Museum Announces New, Original Exhibition, Explore EXCORE: The Art of Underwater Science

# Bishop Museum Announces New, Original Exhibition, Explore EXCORE: The Art of Underwater Science

Opening Sunday, Aug. 24, 2025, Explore EXCORE showcases a vivid world of revolutionary underwater exploration

Honolulu, Hawaiʻi — Bishop Museum, the State of Hawai'i Museum of Natural and Cultural History, announces a new, original exhibition opening to the public on Sunday, Aug. 24: Explore EXCORE: The Art of Underwater Science dives into a vivid world of revolutionary underwater exploration.

For more than a decade, EXCORE — Bishop Museum's Center for the Exploration of Coral Reef Ecosystems — has been a global leader in deploying, and in some cases inventing, the world's most advanced techniques to survey, study, and celebrate the astonishing biodiversity of coral reefs. Established to honor the Museum's century-long tradition of technology-driven discovery, EXCORE carries this legacy forward, illuminating hidden corners of the oceans and bringing coral ecosystems to life through video and imagery taken in breathtaking clarity.

Explore EXCORE: The Art of Underwater Science transforms the Museum's J. M. Long Gallery into a theater of crystal-clear underwater videos, originally captured in 8K resolution, showcasing some of the world's most unexplored oceanic regions and unencountered aquatic creatures. Each video frame is more than a stunning visual; it is a permanent scientific record of 21st-century reef biodiversity, preserved today for generations to come.

"Coral reefs are the 'canaries in the coal mine' for climate change, in that we may lose most coral reef habitat by the end of the century," said Dr. Richard Pyle, Bishop Museum director of EXCORE, senior curator of Ichthyology, database coordinator for Natural Sciences, and co-curator of the exhibition. "We are in a desperate race to document the existence of this incredible biodiversity before it is lost forever. The future of humanity literally depends on it for our continued survival."

While representing a fraction of EXCORE's growing digital archive, the exhibition's immersive films not only transport guests to the Earth's hidden seascapes, they also capture species that may vanish over the next 50 or 100 years.

"We hope that our work not only serves to protect these fragile underwater ecosystems, but through the Explore EXCORE exhibition, also inspire all who visit with the beauty and wonder of our planet's underwater legacy," said Brian Greene, Bishop Museum Ichthyology research specialist and expedition coordinator of EXCORE, and lead curator of the exhibition.

Much of the video content in EXCORE's digital archive, and almost all of the sequences featured in the exhibition, were shot by Greene, who combines state-of-the-art diving gear with equally cutting-edge videography equipment.

"My current system consists of a RED V-RAPTOR [X], a global shutter 8K resolution camera — 35 million-plus more pixels than Hi8 — that is normally used on Hollywood-level feature films such as the latest Superman movie," shared Greene. "The camera is housed within a customized enclosure from Gates Underwater Products in California. Rich and I have worked with them for years and they've customized this housing to our maximum diving depth of about 150 meters."

Explore EXCORE exhibition designer DeAnne Kennedy worked with curators Greene and Pyle in housing Greene's videos in the gallery space using large wall-mounted projectors, paired with a display case showing the progression of underwater cameras used by the EXCORE team over the years, as well as a touch-table interface sharing how underwater imaging has contributed to science, research, and discovery.

Shares Pyle, "The idea for the exhibition really began when DeAnne realized that Brian's posted videos were amazing, and needed to be shared more broadly with the public. The fact that Brian and I were trying to promote the idea of EXCORE fit perfectly with her exhibit theme, and we collaborated to focus the show on the history of Bishop Museum and EXCORE researchers using underwater imaging for science — and producing works of art in the process. Hence the secondary title for the exhibition, 'The Art of Underwater Science.'"

To learn more about Explore EXCORE: The Art of Underwater Science and to purchase tickets, please visit BishopMuseum.org/ExploreExcore.

Media Preview of Explore EXCORE: The Art of Underwater Science

News media are invited to an exclusive, pre-opening, closed-door preview of the exhibition:

• Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025
• 1-4 p.m.
• Bishop Museum, J. M. Long Gallery
• Please RSVP with Lance Aquino via the contact information above

Interview opportunities:

• Dr. Richard Pyle, Bishop Museum director of EXCORE, senior curator of Ichthyology, database coordinator for Natural Sciences, and co-curator of the exhibition
• DeAnne Kennedy, Bishop Museum exhibit designer and Explore EXCORE designer

More about EXCORE

The very first biological specimens accessioned at Bishop Museum included fishes collected by the steamship USSS Albatross in 1887. In the 1940s, a student named John E. "Jack" Randall started using an early SCUBA system, leading him to become the greatest ichthyologist in all of history. Two of his students at the Museum — Brian Greene and Richard Pyle — once again revolutionized undersea scientific research in the 1980s and 1990s by adopting advanced mixed-gas diving technology used by commercial and military divers to explore coral-reef ecosystems down to depths of 500 feet (150 meters) or more.

Today, EXCORE researchers continue to push the boundaries of the latest technologies to explore and document biodiversity inhabiting coral reefs, including closed-circuit rebreathers, autonomous underwater robots, advanced environmental data sensors, the latest molecular analyses, and cutting-edge underwater imaging technology.