‘Yet, this is primarily a superficial – literally, shallow – relationship: after all, the passing of a 100,000 tonne ship goes unnoticed in the deep ocean.’ (6)
‘fluid, indeterminate environments’ (6)
Other exhibitions hosted at the gallery with similar themes: Stuart Brisley: Crossings and Zineb Sedira: Seafaring
‘a body of work that encourages us to think, hear, see and feel the most remote and inaccessible environment on the planet in new ways’ (6)
‘I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me that my hands would tell me more about what happens on the moon than you can find out with your eyes and your telescopes’ (D Diderot) (13)
‘the contemporary sub-maritime represents a new economic, political and cultural frontier’ (13) – a possible narrative in dissertation of past, present and future – the historicised narratives that led to the Anthropocene, the present state/moment of definition, the potentiality of the future depending on the narratives we construct now
Inspiration for And all the seas were ink – ‘a bathymetric map of the globe by which reversing the normal cartographic conventions of representing land and sea offered a glimpse into a looking glass world, the earth appearing as an un-differentiated blank, the seabed as a world of unimagined contours and depths.’ (13)
to dive, to fall, to float, to fly
Freud and Romain Rolland – defining ‘oceanic feeling’ as ‘a feeling of ‘the eternal’ […] without perceptible limits, and as if oceanic’ (13)
‘Unable to ‘discover this ‘Oceanic’ feeling in myself’, Freud suggests that it evidences and internalised remnant of the undifferentiated primitive ego as experienced by the infant prior to its separation from the maternal body. It is perhaps the draw and simultaneous threat of such a sensation of what Kristeva, discussing the Oceanic, calls ‘sensory plenitude’ the desire for and anxious ‘loss of self to what surrounds and contains us’ which lies at the heart of the work’ (13) – first sentence links to Hameed and Drexciya
‘the resistance it [the deep sea] offers to methods of optical survey’ (13)
truthing gap
‘Contemporary geo-scientific visualisation drains the oceans dry, eradicating the play of the motion and mutability to which the watery gives rise, shining the light of reason into its dark spaces in order to produce virtual landscapes, as scenic as they are scientific, over which the disembodied eye may roam unhindered.’ (14)
‘the comparative difficulty of modern science in theorising fluids is echoed in the failure of western philosophical tradition to think through fluid’ (14)
‘Vestiges of aqua-phobia are evident too in Draining the Oceans ‘a virtual scientific expedition’ commissioned by National Geographic, which ‘pulls an imaginary plug’ on the ocean, rudely exposing the under-sea-scape to the skies and allowing geologists to stand unassisted on undersea features such as the mid Atlantic ridge.’ (14)
‘If geophysics shows a predisposition towards the dry, visible and fixed, That Oceanic Feeling calls perhaps for a more liquid encounter with the deep sea, one which is capable of participating in Irigrary’s libidinal positioning of it as the element of rapture.’ (14)
‘had we evolved in an aquatic medium, buoyancy would have given rise to an unthinkably different metaphysics’ (14)
‘the inescapable mutuality of touch’ (16)
I want I want I want
‘Blindness is another re-current motif symbolising not simply the un-seeable character of the ocean below 1000 meters, the Mesopelagic, Bathy Pelagic, Twilight and Midnight zones, into which light is unable to penetrate, but also sensory modalities which, like processes of sounding, are rooted in reciprocity.’ (17)
‘the increased quality and volume of images captured at depth since I began working at NOCS has provoked a degree of ambivalence in me, echoing the inherent contradictions of artistically ‘exploring’ an environment to which I am drawn precisely because of its inaccessibility/invisibility, that runs counter to their sense of achievement.’ (17) – maintaining an element of the unknown – some things are best left unknown – link to embracing the indecipherable nonhuman – we don’t have to conquer/understand/master all
‘the sea has been conceived in terms of nothingness – nowhere, no thing, meaningless materiality’ (18)
‘While contemporary imaging of the deep sea has given it a new place in our consciousness, mitigating perhaps against the polluting effects of an ‘out of sight out of mind’ mentality, it has simultaneously opened up fresh spaces of colonisation.’ (18)
‘My strategy has been in part to observe the observers and in doing so invite reflection on the limits and possibilities of discovery, to playfully test the ways in which knowledge is generated and finally to produce objects which are perhaps capable of expressing an ‘Oceanic Feeling’; works that, to my combined frustration and relief, ultimately embody their own representational inadequacy.’ (18) – links to my own overall difficulties with diss – include in conclusion?
Third chapter has links to Neimanis
‘Until the very recent present, oceans have stood at our feet as a reminder of the limits of human mapping and exploration.’ (27)
‘human consciousness feels entirely restructured, changed and inspired’ (28)
‘To the elements it came from
Everything will return.
Our bodies to earth, Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air.’ (29 – Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna)
‘Lee’s work as a whole constantly uses this interplay between light and touch. A number of her large portraits of the oceanographic team in Southampton include researchers holding or playing with lumps of mud, with eyes closed as if meditating on the messy, weighted reality of underwater material. The portraits are set against a contrastingly unmessy backdrop of digitised data-rich renditions of the earth’s oceans.’ (30)
‘sea’ and ‘see’ (30)
Other relevant artists: Eva Hesse Hang Up, Richard Long A Line Made by Walking, Cornelia Parker Measuring Niagra with a Teaspoon (31)
‘learned translations from touch to graphic representations of the unseen’ (31)
Marie Tharp – ‘a significant map-maker of the twentieth century’ (32)
‘reading the braille of the ocean’ (32)
‘Somewhere in my mind I have the image of the seas peeled away from the earth like the flayed skin of anatomical ecorche’ (35)
‘heliotropically inspired notions of visibility’ (43)
‘These notions of gigantism and blindness were perceived as two sides of a seesaw about the pivot of the norm, of rational sight, and of the priorities of visibility’ (43)
Benthic? (43)
‘If the nineteenth century was all about the horizontality of geographic projects, and the twentieth about verticality and the dominance of aerial space, we might contend that ours is a geographical age concern with depth.’ (43)
‘While science’s trajectory is often concerned with incorporation and accumulation of the unknown into existing knowledge structures, it could be said that Lee is working to explore the disjuncture or gaps made by difference.’ (43) – embracing the unknown
‘It is oft remarked that the sea is less explored than the moon, but in some ways this is not surprising as the moon is a visible surface, in touch with the sun, and so it parallels our interest in all things that live by the work of that fiery ball and its modes of illumination. The oceans, which are incidentally drawn by the moon, have a liquidity and viscosity that elude such easily resolved regimes of the visible (imagine what a photograph of the deep sea looks like).’ (44)
‘What happens, Lee seems to ask, when the tools of measurement meet the materiality under consideration?’ (47)
‘The sea itself, its liquid body, remains elusive.’ (47) – even sea research is most often the sea bed, the rocky, tangible element
‘Lee alerts us to the fact that knowledge is always a form of appropriation. (47)
‘the overwhelming excess of ‘insensible objects’ of the oceans that await description, nomination or apprehension by science’ (48)
‘default terrestrial practices’ (48)
‘every attempt to bring ‘it’ closer, to understand its ‘nature’ is also a form of distancing, a form of recruitment into the world of the visible: this is the exchange from what is foreseeable to what is seeable.’
‘an exchange that is configured around the anticipation of knowledge-based gifts’ (48)
‘The sea is not our home, but it is home to the origins of life, it is the watery cradle of sentient bodies, and still home to uncounted and uncountable organisms, from the extraordinary to the monstrous’ (48) – monstrous links to Haraway
The encircling of a shadow
‘She dislodges this neat axis of the visible that is used to establish a continuum of art and science interests, so that other modalities of knowing are realised for consideration that are internal to both art and science, but with often quite radically different directionalities and concerns.’ (50)
Footnote on last page (51): ‘The oceans may well be the ‘last place’ in the terrestrial bias of the imagination, but as every last place before it attests to, the last is only ever a prelude to a conquering tautology that, like late capitalism, is a site of constant renewal for a new commodity frontier (for bioprospecting of marine organisms, petroleum and gas extraction, and seabed dredging). The history of the geology teaches us that if we wait long enough the sea will come to us to wash away our architectural signatures and material wastes. But this imaginary, too, is complicated by what the sea has to hold in terms of wastes: atmospheric, nuclear, plastic, chemical. It could be said that the giant flushing system has just backed up.’
Also from ‘Truthing Gap’ article in ARQ:
‘Problems of depth and visibility make optical survey of deep-sea environments extremely difficult, necessitating that they be mapped instead by sonar.’ – potential link here to katie Paterson’s piece as to do with the sound of water – the one sense rock can’t reach?! An embrace of the haptic
‘Thereafter I present the idea that current bathymetric practice, which is centred on the virtual draining and illumination of undersea spaces, evidences the wider challenge posed to scientific and philosophical thought by the fluid. If geophysics shows a predisposition towards the ‘dry’, fixed and definable, my work is in part a call for new kinds of liquid encounter with the emergent landscape of the deep sea.’
‘Once brought to the surface, mud cores must be stored in atmospherically controlled environments in order to prevent them from reverting to dust, a circumstance which in the context of this essay might be read as a metaphor for the need to balance ‘dry thinking’, 2 a term coined by geographer Paul Carter for systems of analysis which privilege the pursuit of fixed distinctions, with ‘liquid intelligence’.3’
‘The visible traces of my handprints upon these lumps of clay conjure an infantile desire to know the world by sensation rather than observation.’
Link the (post-Enlightenment) desire to map nature, to draw lines around it, to label as in some way holding it at arms’ length from ourselves, creating the idea of an ‘it’ and a ‘me’?? – links to something she says in the 5min video as well as – ‘This can be understood as an extension of the wider post-Enlightenment scientific project of rendering the natural world as observable phenomena. It might also be said to evidence a literal and metaphoric impulse to lay the submarine world bare and shine the light of reason into its murky depths.’
‘Classically within a hierarchy of the senses, sight has been valued above touch, the mutuality of which has the potential to bring a different set of subject and object relations into play than those occasioned by an epistemology of distance, characterised by detached observation and disembodied objectivity.’
‘One colleague at nocs told me of an instance when the temperature of a black smoker (undersea hydrothermal vent) was brought home to him not by the gauges on his instrument panel, but by watching a length of ducting tape, attached to a piece of external equipment, melt away; activating an imagined sensation of the extreme heat involved.’
‘In the biblical tale Doubting Thomas felt moved to put his hand into Christ’s wounds to test the authenticity of his resurrection; seeing does not always amount to believing.’
‘For Deleuze and Guattari, the sea constitutes an archetypal example of ‘smooth space’,16 heterogeneous, haptic, rather than optic, constituted around events and intensities, while subject nevertheless to cycles and processes of striation – gridding, mapping, longitude and latitude.1’
‘Even when artificially illuminated, the light absorbing properties of water at depth (in combination with ‘marine snow’)20 restrict visibility to a few metres, eradicating the horizon line and collapsing the spatial distance upon which sightseeing and survey as producing practices depend’ – links to the free fall lectures and the horizon line being a very grounding, stabilising point – embrace the idea that we need to lose our stable horizons, immerse ourselves in the new (or the ancient) and start to feel what we need
‘A key characteristic of the smooth is the emphasis it places on bodily encounter and experience at close range.’
‘offering a counterpoint to the disembodied opticality and deductive emphasis of bathymetric survey and simultaneously problematising ideas of walking as a critical tool from the perspective of its anthro/terra-centrism.’
‘At its most immediate, entry into water effects an alteration in the balance of the body – our centres of buoyancy and gravity being differently located – and has the potential, along with factors such as temperature, darkness, scale, to be deeply disorientating.’
Water introduces another dimension – when we are immersed we have height to play with – almost like flying – we are less grounded, more free
‘As a child I was given an illustrated Bible that included an illustration of Moses parting the Red Sea, pushing the water back like a curtained wall to reveal the usually hidden seabed. I was both fascinated and disturbed by the image. Connery identifies this incident, along with the miracle of Christ walking on the water, as indicative of an antipathy towards the watery (discernible, he argues, in other aspects of culture) that reaches its biblical dénouement in the Book of Revelations with the final banishment of the sea. ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea.’
‘Vestiges of aquaphobia are discernible in ‘a virtual scientific expedition’ commissioned by National Geographic, on which my co-researcher at nocs, Dr Tim Le Bas, worked as consultant. As suggested by its name, Draining the Oceans is a cgi animation that ‘pulls an imaginary plug’ on the ocean, eradicating the play of motion and mutability to which the watery gives rise and enacting a kind of hydrographic hegemony. The effect of this is rudely to expose the under-sea-scape to the skies, recasting the deepest submaritime environments as terrestrial ciphers and allowing geologists to stand unassisted on undersea features such as the mid Atlantic ridge. Liquids can be said by their nature to resist attempts to ‘map’ them, evoking a desire to corral their fluidity and engineer them into recognition. The trope of fluidity and flux has been theorised by feminist thinkers, in particular Luce Irigaray, as offering a means to disturb and dissolve the dualisms upon which Western culture is founded, allowing instead for a play of difference. According to Alison Stones: The notion of material fluidity emerges out of Irigaray’s earlier analyses of the western philosophical tradition, which, she believes, consistently fails to think through the fluid – as, for her, does modern science, with its comparative difficulty in theorising fluids.’
Anna Harris 