Climate Change Goes Live, or Capturing Life? For a Blue
Media Studies
Bogna M. Konior
symploke, Volume 27, Numbers 1-2, 2019, pp. 47-63 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734650
Access provided at 7 Nov 2019 16:33 GMT from Amsterdam Universiteit
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surely will follow— denote the civilizational origin of environmental change:
industrial capitalism and fossil fuel extraction, the Great Acceleration, and
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been suggested as the starting
points of this socio-geological epoch (Davis and Turpin 2015).
If our perception is accustomed to the endless circulation of images, it
is no wonder that culture has been recently charged with the responsibility
of visualizing the unseen calamity of oceanic degradation. The oceans are
undoubtedly screened as never before: as the human inability to envision
large-scale geological politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more
innovative and impressive machinic eyes. The Russian early film theorist
Dziga Vertov already wrote about recording technologies as humanity’s
“third eye,” enabling it access to inhuman spaces (1984). As if updating this
early-cinema theory to modern times, in 2012, James Cameron made a recordbreaking solo dive to the bottom of Mariana Trench, proving that even the
previously inaccessible deep sea floor can be recorded and thus remotely seen
by anyone with YouTube access. Nevertheless, as Pierre Bélanger notices, the
ocean “remains a glaring blind spot in the Western imagination” even though
“it represents the ‘other 71% of our planet’” and is increasingly instrumentalized, “offshore zones territorialized by nation-states, high seas crisscrossed
by shipping routes, estuaries metabolized by effluents, sea levels sensed by
satellites, seabeds lined with submarines and plumbed for resources” (2014,
3). The popular imagination of the ocean as the great unknown, explored less
than the surface of the moon, figures it as the perfect vessel for the anxiety
around the imperceptibly changing climate.
While there is no shortage of films or photographs that illustrate oceanic
pollution, my effort in this article is to move beyond these obviously educational objects and towards a theorization of a “blue” media object, that is
an object that belongs to a specific type of mediation. Taking as my case
study the naturally decomposing underwater installations by Jason deCaires
Taylor, which can be viewed either underwater or on a screen, I will focus
on durational decay as a particular trait of oceanic media in the climate
change era. (This theme has also been present in the work of artists such
as Simon Gilby, whose disappearing salt sculpture of a young boy speaks
both to the fragility of migrant bodies and vulnerability of environments
in the Australian context [Gilby and Wilson 2016]). In Taylor’s case, this
temporal decomposition, I argue, links them to various drowned histories
that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade
and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as “as an unmarked
grave site” (Deloughrey 2017, 35). I chose Taylor’s “live” sculptures because
the capture and mediation of life itself is crucial to the blue humanities at
the present moment when the ocean is increasingly defined by extinction,
an ongoing crisis that nevertheless cannot be captured as a “live” media
event. Referring to the work of Joanna Zylinska and Sarah Kember, as well
as Pasi Väliaho, I aim to analyze how blue media studies in the Anthropocene
perform their own disappearance, in the future as extinction and in the past
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as murder, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture
the productive capacities of life. Thus frozen between aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and
decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety
as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own
capture within the logic of production. I will develop this argument in three
sections: first, a quick overview of the nascent field of “blue media studies”
and an introduction of my chosen case study, then, a contextual section about
the ‘drowned’ history of the transoceanic slave trade, and finally, an analysis
of blue mediation in the context of contemporary biopower.
The Word of the Hour is Drowning
“I can’t tell you how bad I smelt after the dive—the smell of millions of
rotting animals.”
—Richard Vevers, a photographer documenting dying coral reefs
(qtd. in Slezak 2016)
The rising of waters and oceanic pollution is a key thematic and aesthetic
component of post-cinematic moving images, where “post-cinema” refers
to the technological mutation of the moving image into a “digital, interactive, networked, ludic, miniaturized, mobile, social, processual, algorithmic,
aggregative, environmental” form (Denson 2016, 1). While it would be hard
to dispute that many cinematic “blue” media objects, such as multiple selfprofessed activist documentaries (A Plastic Ocean, Chasing Coral, Deep Blue,
Blue, Mission Blue), mainstream production with an ecological narrative (Life
of Pi, Noah, Interstellar), and post-cinematic objects such as recent virtual
and augmented reality projects (Crystal Reef, The Stanford Ocean Acidification
Experience) can serve an educational purpose, underneath this activism lies
the desire to calm the quickly progressing vertigo of post-globality, where
globalization failed to unify nations yet succeeded in producing a planetary
master narrative of the ecological crisis that implicates everyone, albeit without providing a new ground for universality (Sussman 2012), much less an
imagery suitable to its scale. Fredric Jameson already identified this problem
in his work on moving images and the geopolitical unconscious, writing
that postmodern culture is grappling with its own inability to think totality:
“all thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world
system as such” (1995, 4). Jameson proposes that culture can gesture at or
intuit the workings of global capitalism, thus allowing us to cognitively map
what is otherwise invisible (1988).
Addressing these paradoxes in relation to the environmental crisis, in a
passage worth citing at length, Rob Nixon notices that its “slow violence” is
tied to a perceptual and representational crisis:
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By “slow violence” I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out
of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across
time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed
as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event
or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in
space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need,
I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is
neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and
accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range
of temporal scales…. Climate change…acidifying oceans, and a
host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present
formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to
mobilize and act decisively. (2011, 2)
We thus confront two representational problems. First of all, the problem of
time, which requires a relation to history that allows the inhuman temporality of the so-called “natural” order in human politics. This lies at the heart of
our post-global era: the inability to scale the local to the global, or scale down
in a reverse manner, as well as the insatiable instinct towards historiography,
a revaluation of the human role in natural history, or vice versa. Second is the
corresponding crisis of mediation, that is, the crisis of representational and
interventionist capacities of culture, expressed in both the desire to visualize everything and the inability to produce a sensationalist media event out
of climate change. These problems interlock underwater, where the ocean,
already often imagined as the realm of the unknown, be it the invisible horror
of its dark depths or the mythos of Cthulhu, accumulates another layer of
occlusion as the site of a scientifically inscrutable future, much less a future
that is politically or socially configurable.
Because of, rather than despite this crisis of temporality and representation, such intense yet uneventful ecological collapse that eludes human
eyes, cognition and memory can only be apprehended by mediation or a
manipulation of the sensible. Science historian Sheila Jasanoff argues that
because climate change is invisible, we can only access reality through
several levels of mediation, for example in the form of climate maps on the
news (2010). As I interpret her argument, mediation is the unlikely realist
answer to the following paradox: the world is replete with wholly real and
yet hard to figure phenomena revealed to us by science. However, a field
of “blue media studies” that extends beyond the analysis of thematic and
representational themes is still in the making. While there is no shortage of
eco-critical and media studies scholarship, rarely do the two come together,
given that the former takes as its task to ethically and politically scrutinize
the foundational objects of the latter, at times even to advocate a deceleration of technological development. The field that we call the environmental
humanities broadly encompasses ecocriticism and cultural studies on the
one hand, with media and STS (science and technology studies) on the other.
In the first category, scholars draw on the methods established by philosophers such as Val Plumwood, who urges us to pay attention to historical
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and colonial conditions of climate change (2002). Such studies often engage
textual analysis to uncover cultural memories of local communities and their
struggles against capitalism or modernity, while advocating for a reparative bond with the environment (Matthews and Simpson 2014; Johns-Putra
2018). On the other hand, on the media and technology front, scholarship
focuses on the paradoxically intimate relation between technology and the
environment. Jussi Parikka, for example, examines how the infrastructure
of undersea network cables destroys the “fantasy of frictionless communication” and how the “politics [of communication are] infused with matters
technological” (2013, 13-14). There has been no shortage of research that deals
specifically with the oceanic or the watery, which we can (rudely) divide into
ethical materialism and political materialism. In the first category, we find
the efforts of Astrida Neimanis, who has been systematically articulating
feminist blue humanities. In Bodies of Water, she argues for a relational and
embodied model of subjectivity, which takes seriously the fact that humans
are “bodies of water;” a position informed by feminist theories of the body
that she perceives as necessary for creating a non-patriarchal, non-colonial
environmental ethics (2017). In the second, we find Nicole Starosielski’s The
Undersea Network (2015), an investigation into underwater oceanic infrastructure as embedded in historical and cultural conflicts, especially the history
of communication technologies and the underwater expansion of capitalism.
Drowned Histories: Illegal Time
Has our reader heard about the parallel strands of time in two-track time?
Such branch stretches of time do exist, a little illegal, to be sure, and problematic but when carrying such contraband as ours, such supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one cannot be too particular.... And so, at some
point in our story, we shall attempt to take such a branch turning, a siding, and shunt this illegal history into it.
—Bruno Schulz (n.d.)
Invisibility…gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite
on the beat.... Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you
are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it
leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.
—Ralph Ellison (qtd in Gilroy 1993, 202)
If climate change is the interstitium between human history and inhuman time, the temporality of the Anthropocene is “a little illegal,” to use
Bruno Schulz’s apt phrase, because the correlation of capitalist industry and
planetary ecology is a crime projected into the future. When the ticking bomb
of pollution goes off, the perpetrators will be long dead. A perfect crime
escapes justice through temporal fornication; it complicates our relationship
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to history. The Anthropocene is an undead territory of violence, where the
present is extended into two interlocking graves: the past and the future, each
a specific mode of death. In the future awaits extinction and, in the past awaits
murder. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin date the epoch back to 1610, to the
century that set the contours of colonial imperialism, global slave trade and
economic reliance on coal (2015). A golden spike marks these changes in the
geological record. The intercontinental transport of animals, plants, humans,
and diseases changed the planet’s biochemistry. The death of fifty million
Native Americans, the resulting loss of agriculture and subsequent forest
re-growth altered the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The
ocean, where many African slaves lost their lives, is also a graveyard.
Death and decay are the central themes in Jason deCairnes Taylor’s
work, who, next to Betty Beaumont, was one of the first artists to push land
art into a new territory—the ocean. “[I make my work] because, as we all
know,” Taylor states matter-of-factly, “our reefs are dying, and our oceans
are in trouble” (2015). His “Underwater Museum,” a vast installation of over
800 sculptures installed all over the planet commenced in 2006. The installation can be visited in person (by diving) or watched on recordings in galleries or on the artist’s website. The underwater sculptures are made from a
marine, pollutant-free cement with a neutral pH, twenty times stronger than
its terrain counterpart. The initial purpose was to lower the environmental
costs of storing the sculptures. With time, however, they turned into artificial
reefs, attracting sponges, algae, and corals. Strategically placed downstream
just before larval coral spewing occurs, they can sustain a tiny ecosystem.
Even a small Volkswagen Beetle sculpture “has an internal living habitat
to encourage crustaceans such as lobsters and sea urchins” (Taylor 2015).
Taylor’s activist efforts have seen marine biomass increase by over 200% in
once-deserted sections of the seabed. One time, visitors to his “Ocean Atlas”
(2014) in the Bahamas, the world’s largest sculpture, which reimagines the
mythical figure as a Bahamian girl carrying the weight of the ocean on her
shoulders, alerted the authorities to a leak from a nearby oil refinery. In
response, the government pledged substantial amounts of money to coastal
cleanups. For another artwork, Taylor cast five hundred local fishermen into
sculptures and placed them on a coastline of the small village they inhabited in Mexico. A protected area was then created between Cancun and Isla
Mujeres to preserve the artificial reef.
What makes Taylor’s work interesting is that the sculptures are designed
to be mutated and eventually decomposed. As he describes the process,
“each marine species is a group of inquisitive visitors, each lending their own
special touch to the site,” eventually morphing and altering the sculptures:
Sponges look like veins across the faces. Staghorn coral morphs
the form. Fireworms scrawl white lines as they feed. Tunicates
explode from the faces. Sea urchins crawl across the bodies feeding at night. Coralline algae applies a kind of purple paint. The
deepest red I’ve ever seen in my life lives underwater. Gorgonian
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fans oscillate with the waves. Purple sponges breathe water like air.
And grey angelfish glide silently overhead. (2015)
In this series, humanoids are figured in cement but also disfigured by various
marine species that turn the sculptures into tiny ecosystems:
I start out with a simple image or quite often a human figure,
because I know however much you disfigure the human body you
can still recognize some part of it as some identifying feature you
can relate to [yet] the longer they are underwater the more the layers
of calcium deposit will start to form, so they’ll start to grow more
unrecognizable over time…it’s completely amalgamated with the
sea floor in a year’s time. (qtd. in Pangburn 2016)
Such aesthetic disappearance, albeit ostentatiously performative in stating its
own expiry, nevertheless seems fitting: the ocean, often colloquially described
as the Earth’s lifeline, is increasingly defined by extinction. Writing about the
ocean has become an exercise in apocalyptic list-making, where the litany
of disasters is naturalised as an everyday dystopia: coral bleaching, rising
water temperatures, the destruction of entire marine habitats by bottom
trawling and dynamite fishing, comparable to razing a forest to bare soil,
frequent oil spills, over 300 million tons of plastic dumped into the waters
every year alongside agricultural pesticides, artificial hormones and cosmetic
preservatives, and finally the obsessive slaughter of sharks, a key predator,
which humans kill ten million of a year. These rapidly progressing changes
lead many to advocate for environmental preservation. Yet, as Taylor’s work
can symbolize, it is mutation rather than conservation that underwrites
Anthropocenic history. Rather than simply symbolizing an “anti-anthropocentric” stance, the disfiguration of humanoid sculptures acknowledges the
weight of death and history under the waves.
This history appears both through Taylor’s own record as well as prior
stories written into the waters. Born to a British father and a Guyanese
mother, Taylor grew up in Malaysia, where he first started exploring coral
reefs:
I didn’t want to go over to the Caribbean as a colonial British artist
and start trying to tell people about their own past. It just wouldn’t
be read in the right way. I did want to integrate some of the history
of the Grenada into my work and seek funding. That meant working with the tourist board and local government, and ultimately
compromising, which can make it difficult to preserve your integrity. I also had lots of help from the diving association and fisheries
as well as volunteers from the local community college, who made
casts of their own faces. (qtd. in Patel 2014)
One sculpture in particular, “Vicissitudes” (2006), which depicts schoolchildren arranged in a prayer circle, caused speculation as to the political nature
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of Taylor’s work. “It is not surprising,” Elizabeth Deloughrey writes, “[that]
when Taylor began to sink life-sized human sculptures under the Caribbean
Sea, the majority of viewers assumed it was an act of memorializing the lost
lives of the middle passage” (2017, 36). As the prominent African American
artist Fred Wilson points out with disappointment, Taylor had initially
denied that his sculptures related to the middle passage, focusing instead
on biodiversity (2014, 13). The subsequent discussion about Taylor’s intent
and the artwork’s relation to slavery “led the artist to deny any intentional
connection to the middle passage, while later acknowledging that in working
with the tourist board he was forced to make compromises” (Deloughrey
2017, 39). Perhaps this is why, in his recent work, Taylor makes his concern
for drowned histories explicit. One of his first European sculptures, “The
Raft of Lampedusa” (2015) installed off the coast of Lanzarote in Spain, was
composed of thirteen humanoid sculptures placed on an inflatable refugee
boat. West Saharan Abdel Kader, now forty years old, who modelled for
Taylor, made the sail to Lanzarote when he was only twelve, barely surviving it (Smillie 2016). Bypassing the problem of authorial intent, Deloughrey
argues that when climate change is “shaping new oceanic imageries,” the
ocean can no longer be perceived as an aqua nullius, devoid of history, but
instead refers to the Caribbean thought, most prominently represented in
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, a classic work that established transoceanic
methodologies of critical race theory, where the ocean is always-already
figuring violent material history (1993, 32). The aesthetic and factual decay
of human life, marine life, and various drowned, un-representable histories
connects Taylor to Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic is “an unmarked
grave site,” which the poets “peopled with human bones, imaginatively
figured in the limestone structures of coral reefs” (35).
It is not the representability of history but rather the dissolution of
humanoid forms that reveals the violence of the ocean and its inseparability
from colonialism, which dissolved, decomposed, and commodified multiple
bodies. For Deloughrey “the process of anthropomorphizing the corals [in
Caribbean poetry] leads to a visual poetics of the submarine debris of human
history. Figuring nonhuman lifeforms as human bones enables the visibility
of a history” (2017). Caribbean aesthetics, responding to colonialism, racism,
and capitalism inform the ecologies that figure the ocean as continually
mutating “the human and the nonhuman, the biological and the geophysical, the historic and the contemporary” (34). Rather than transcending the
human, Deloughrey argues, Taylor’s work is an example of a new oceanic
ontology, which “figure[s] maritime space as a multispecies and embodied
place in which the oceanic contours of the planet, including its submarine
creatures, are no longer outside of the history of the human” (42).
Studying this historical context should not, however, lock us in the past.
In the Anthropocene, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in “The Climate of
History,” history is looped inside a claustrophobic temporal cage (2009). To
rephrase his argument, the Anthropocene is the suffocating recognition that
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all time is human time and no temporality is separable from human industrial history. This claustrophobia extends towards the future: writing about
Taylor’s “Last Correspondent,” Allewaert and Ziser note that,
the oceanic tranquility of [the sculpture]—rooted to his chair, his
mouth and ears stopped, breathless in the filtered tropical light—
seems in this particular image to be posthumously menaced by
a cloud of sand approaching on the horizon…even the ironic,
Ozymandian consolation that the Anthropocene era too will pass is
denied to us. (2012, 235)
Engaging marine species within specific histories of development and decay,
the decomposing sculptures reveal not only the current environmental and
industrial problems but also populate the territories that in the colonial imagination existed as conquerable aqua nullius. At the same time, this violent
proximity between human and natural histories, where the ocean figures as a
graveyard, asserts the temporal claustrophobia of the Anthropocene.
Media and Life:
Screening Decomposition
And why wouldn’t the people be vanishing, given the countless acts of aggression and invasion performed against them in mainstream media, but
also in reality? Who could actually withstand such an onslaught without
the desire to escape this visual territory of threat and constant exposure?
—Hito Steyerl (2012, 167)
I’ve realized that the greatest thing about what we do, the really humbling thing about the work, is that as soon as we submerge the sculptures,
they’re not ours anymore, because as soon as we sink them, the sculptures
belong to the sea.
—Jason Taylor (2015)
The thrill of visiting Taylor’s museum is denied to many, if not most of
his audiences, who view the sculptures on screen rather than underwater.
In the three videos on Taylor’s website, the sculptures are filmed with an
underwater camera. The videos alternate from black and white to full color.
Accompanied by an epic soundtrack, the camera swims around the sculptures as the image decelerates and accelerates, manipulating the passage
of time and thus directly showing us what the human eye cannot see: the
morphing of the sculptures in a time-lapse or its details in slow motion.
Nevertheless, for the artist, viscerality and realism are the key elements of
the experience. “Visitors to the various underwater museums who are able
to sink themselves beneath the waves,” he states, “can experience the reality of
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marine life more directly and intimately [than in a] traditional white-walled
museum” (Taylor n.d., n.p.; my emphasis). Writing about the installations,
Deloughrey puts forth a similar argument:
This experience, unlike that of a terrestrial gallery, depends on
weather and currents; impressions are informed by light, the
viscosity of the water, the age of the sculptures, and the presence
of marine species. While the exhibits are “permanent,” the sculptures are not; they change every day based on their occupation by
bacteria, algae, and, eventually, coral. [The work is] transformed by
salt, currents, pressure, and the rapid occupation by multispecies
ecologies. (Deloughrey 2017, 37)
While the sculptures’ decomposition is central to the artworks, it belies the
mediated way in which most audiences interact with them. In fact, photography and film are often used for the exact opposite of the impermanence
that Deloughrey identifies as the main difference between the underwater
museum and a traditional one. Furthermore, if all audiences were to see the
sculptures underwater, the artworks would draw criticism that eco-tourism
in general accumulates, for example in Antarctica, which, as scientists claims,
has its delicate ecosystem disrupted by numerous and increasingly popular
wildlife trips (Rix 2015). Apparently aware of the issue, Taylor himself once
stated that his artificial reefs draw attention away from unexplored marine
areas: “sculptures are placed away from existing reefs often in areas of barren
sandbanks to boost diversity, but also to draw tourists away from the delicate
ecosystems and fragile corals of existing reefs, where divers may do more
harm than good with their well-intentioned curiosity” (Taylor n.d., n.p.). By
this logic, however, the artworks would always be best-viewed on a screen.
Given that ecologically-sensitive areas continually expand, would not all
“blue” art desire to draw human attention and presence away from the places
of concern?
At the same time, the mediated allure of these forbidden spaces where
humans would be considered an invasive species is that they invite visceral
exploration—first by eye, then by muscle. As for Taylor’s museum, if the
artworks were intended to draw tourists away from unexplored areas by
interesting them instead in a spectacular process of decomposition, the work
cannot resist its own mediation and hence a preservation of time bound in
an image. The sculptures are meant to be dissolved by corals and algae but
the recordings preserve them for the present and the future: a decomposition
frozen in time. While the algae slowly mutate humanoid sculptures, figuring
through disappearance the deathly or inhumane regimes of temporality and
history, the recordings provide viewers with a third eye, where marine life
can be controlled on various temporal scales. Indeed, while duration is the
main characteristic of the artworks underwater, on a screen the three videos
manipulate time by using slow and accelerated motion, creating a poetic and
highly stylized fly-on-the-wall aesthetic.
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The desire to both witness the dissolution of the human in time but
simultaneously preserve and control it speaks to a larger dynamic in visual
culture. Like Nixon, cited earlier, Hito Steyerl writes about a representational
crisis—the disappointment that cultural representation, once perceived as the
primary site of politics, turned out to be a vehicle of commodification. For
Steyerl, in today’s image economy, we are “‘represented to pieces,’ rather than
amused to death” (2012, 168). Rather than striving for authentic images, she
argues, we should use their ceaseless carnival as a cover, jamming the logic of
representation by deconstructing the authenticity of the human through digital means, such as spam. We could, she continues, use this over-production
by way of an exodus under the veil of over-representation, with the machines
that produce countless stock images and commodified representations of
identities, humans, and nonhumans absolving us from our own participation
in the spectacular logic of commodification. Within this dynamic, Taylor’s
work aims for a catharsis, an exit route from the overrepresentation of human
power, but the use of recording devices that freeze decomposition in time
speaks to that power exactly. The underwater museum expresses the desire
to see the dissolution of humans by nature, which some still long to perceive
as transcendent and powerful, rather than increasingly formed by the
behavior and customs of humans. Taylor’s performative attempts to evade
Chakrabarty’s claustrophobic diagnosis of the Anthropocene—there is no
time but human time—long to conjure a temporality outside the human, but
at the same time, seek to control that temporality by digitally constraining it.
If this dynamic is inherent to blue media in the Anthropocene, it is
because the oceans are not only blue—they are also black and as such nonperceptible both in their figuration of the colonial-capitalist history of slavery
as well as in the blackness and invisibility of their depths. It is only fitting
that the invisible depths of the oceans would require a type of mediation that
is aware of its own disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life
in the black waters. The sculptures’ decomposition, designed to be viewed
on a screen in the inevitable case that the artworks eventually expire, tells us
something about how we interact with the knowledge of oceanic pollution,
human impermanence, and its violent history. Blue media lie between the
dynamic process of decomposition and extinction, as well as the invisibility
of history, be it migration and slavery, both entangled with the narrative of
the Anthropocene.
The invisibility of environmental change, an event that plays out through
inhuman (although human-induced) temporality, alike poses a representational challenge. As Ian Buchanan writes, while climate change became a
signifier of ecological change at large, the oceans are endangered by overfishing, plastic pollution and the irresponsible cycles of consumption and
overproduction that fuel industrial capitalism at large (2016). Yet, neither
oceanic degradation nor the already ongoing (and forgotten) dissolution of
migrant and slave bodies in the waters qualifies for a “live” coverage. This
is paradoxical for a media culture characterized by obsessive and immediate
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coverage of disasters, which as Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes argue, can form
a “disaster marathon,” a live coverage of a single calamity for hours or days
(2007, 164). These marathons do not simply testify to the human attraction
to gore but are necessary to forming a collective consciousness. Relying
on Durkheim’s sociology of ritual, in Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of
History, Daniel Dayan and Katz provide the canonical definition of media
events as parallel to religious rites, which put daily routines on halt in order
to unify the public within a transcendent narration (2015). As Zylinska and
Kember summarize:
Ceremonial media events are exceptional events for Dayan and
Katz: they monopolize airtime; they happen live; they are organized, courtly, and awe-inspiring. Significantly, they differ from
news events by shifting the focus from conflict to reconciliation....
Media events and news events are different genres of broadcasting
for Dayan and Katz, genres that represent, respectively, the integration and disintegration of society. (2012, 33)
While singular natural disasters can produce news events, the pollution of
the oceans cannot become a media event because of its ongoing, gradual
nature. Is it therefore not surprising that visual culture—from mainstream
disaster movies to activist artworks—has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant
space of awe. Seeking to substitute for the missing “liveness” of climate
change, media artworks like Taylor’s seek to use life itself as a component of
mediation, exerting control over “nature” all the while they fantasize about
human weakness in its face. Rather than walking away from moving images,
which, as Steyerl argues are “dangerous devices of capture: of time, affect,
productive forces, and subjectivity,” or even “tools of disappearance” that
“drain away your life” (2012, 168), the artworks are recorded and replayed,
their temporality tamed and manipulated. In this way, the terror of decay is
partially domesticated.
In Life After New Media, Joanna Zylinska and Sarah Kember write that
contemporary media are characterized by the relationship between mediation
as lifeness of media, which is the “possibility of emergence” of the new (2012,
xvii), and the liveness of media, “particularly linked with television news and
the coverage of disaster and catastrophe” (xvi). Seeking to move beyond
media objects to study all-encompassing, simultaneously biological and sociological process of mediation, Zylinska and Kember see “life” and “medium”
as inherently tied: life is “reduced to a medium” (xiii) and articulated as a
medium “of reproduction, transformation, flattening, and patenting that other
media forms (CDs, video cassettes, chemically printed photographs, and so
on) underwent previously” (xii). Mediation is not simply representation but
rather articulates our “becoming with the technological world” (xv) and is
particularly related to temporality: the media’s “liveness…transience, duration, and frequently predicted death” (xvi). Mediation is intimately related
to this sense of passing, the sense of impermanence and the need to inhabit
symplokeˉ
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the process of life itself through technology. Unlike for Dayan and Katz, they
treat media events as “heightened rather than anomalous phenomena”—they
are not simulacra or “time out” from the everyday but constitute a “time in”
that helps us notice that we are always-already in the midst of mediation, or
in the midst of life by other name (2009, 41). Rather than driving a wedge
between the natural and the cultural, the real and the simulated, mediation
is about the middle way precisely—it is life itself. For example, analyzing
media events around the Large Hadron Collider, which was purported to
be able to create a small black hole and annihilate the world, they notice that
speculative annihilation events that happen in the future remain unrepresentable but are already present through their mediation: the Higgs boson,
for example, is “not distinguishable from its animations” (54-55). Recalling
Anne Friedberg’s argument that screens are “ontological cuts” that transpose
faraway places onto the everyday (qtd. in Väliaho 2014, 5), such mediation,
they argue, although not actualizing as a classically-understood media event,
means that the calamity is happening already, playing out in the amalgamated virtual-real space (5). Mediation is therefore also a relation to history,
once that does not obey causality or chronologies and lets us instead dwell in
the constant emergence of life as a technology.
How could “Blue mediation”—first of artworks by marine life, then
of marine life by recording media—fit between the poles of lifeness and live
events? It might not be so celebratory and activist after all. While Zylinska
and Kember embrace mediation as a productive force (2012, 40), Pasi
Väliaho warns that all mediations of life are part of biopolitical structures of
power, where killing or sustaining images in their circulation constitutes the
neoliberal management of vitality, with the goal of promoting the endless
production of the “neoliberal way of life, with its notions of threat, contingency, and emergency” (2014, xii). To this extent, Väliaho understands the
neoliberal biopower as “maintaining psychological immunity based on the
premise that life in its adaptive, emergent, and creative possibilities needs
to be protected” so that it can continue to be productive (xii). Keeping life
in circulation and extracting value from it is one of the dominant traits of
contemporary capitalism. While Taylor’s artwork has a self-professed activist purpose, it is also symptomatic of the desire to capture life or use life’s
creative labor as a way to multiply images that capture its creative power in
order to produce cultural and monetary capital. More importantly, is turns
the process of decomposition on its head in order to freeze its productivity
in a form of a moving image that is easy to circulate and commodify. The
decomposition, meant to be experienced underwater, is instead bound in a
moving image that is symptomatic of the contemporary biopower’s desire
to “positively promote the productive capacities of bodies and populations”
(17). For Väliaho, contemporary neoliberal visuality is designed to articulate
subjects in “terms of their biological, evolutionary, and emergent properties”
that enter production cycles (10), where our “sensory apparatus and perceptual focus became the key force and source of value” (13). It is in this light
60
Bogna M. Konior
Climate Change Goes Live
that we can understand blue media as responding to the fact that the oceans
are increasingly defined by death. Because the mediation of life becomes
necessary in the absence of a live climate change event, blue media perform
their own decomposition or death, thus recalling other disappearances of life
in the waters, while also participating in the neoliberal imperative to capture
the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where
disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously
perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition
by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude
of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the
neoliberal logic of production.
Conclusion
Climate fatalism causes apathy and depression—in 2009, biologist
Camille Parmesan confessed that she suffered from “professional depression”
after Texas governors ignored her demands regarding the sustainability of the
Galveston Bay, while a psychologist who regularly works with climate scientists recounted that they suffer from “pre-traumatic stress, the overwhelming
sense of anger, panic and obsessive-intrusive thoughts [because] their work
every day is to chart a planetary future that looks increasingly apocalyptic”
(Holmes 2015; Loria 2014). As if echoing Donna Haraway’s description of the
Anthropocene (“you will come down in a freaked-out ecosystem, where the
jellyfish and the slime will sting you to oblivion”) (2015, 11)—the renowned
sailor and the chair of an environmental protection agency, Dame Ellen
MacArthur predicts that by the 2050s the weight of the plastic in our oceans
will be more than that of its marine life (Wearden 2016).
As if the process of mourning had already begun, these affects spell out
a paradox. As Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro write,
the possible end to our global hegemony because of our global hegemony is
a monstrous narrative of progress, where a narrative of transcendence, be it
fate or nature, that we considered gone, comes back with a double force: “the
sensations of a definitive return of a form of transcendence that we believed
transcended, and which reappears in a more formidable form than ever”
(2016, 31). Moving between political, materialist and aesthetic poles of this
sensation is a formidable task facing media studies today. The ocean, itself
a transcendent referent of the unknown, is as blue as it is black, both in its
articulation of history as in its depths. While Maggie Kainulainen’s suggestion that “it is the representations of climate change that ‘peddle’ common
sense that dissuade [the] rearticulation of the social [as more than human]”
(2013, 121) deserves to be considered, the neoliberal logic of articulating the
social as a more-than-human vitality is already entangled with various “antianthropocentric” articulations of value. Taylor urges us to consider that
“if someone was to throw an egg at the Sistine Chapel, we’d all go crazy…
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61
yet every day we dredge, pollute and overfish our oceans. And I think it’s
easier for us to do that, because…we don’t see the havoc we’re wreaking”
(2015). This protectionist impulse, which goes hand in hand with the desire
to visualize and record everything, in the case of blue media in particular,
seeing how they figure the unknown as well as remain the liminal point of
the capture of life itself, warrants further research. Commenting on Taylor’s
underwater museum, an art critic offers a fantasy of human disappearance:
“[These sculptures of] passive viewers of television, people taking selfies,
this benighted raft of the hungry and hopeless.... Maybe he’s dreaming of a
time where humans have been left behind, a nature that’s survived us.... We
might be the forgotten ones” (qtd in Smillie 2016). While the dream of human
irrelevance opens potent ethical possibilities, it simultaneously conjures new
fantasies of power: their name is not threat but inevitability, a form of fate
that we once believed transcended.
UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
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