Climate Change Goes Live, or Capturing Life? For a Blue Media Studies

Introduction

The words of the hour in ecological and economic circles are meltdown and underwater. These two forms of drowning are connected by more than just metaphor.

—Monique Allewaert and Michael Ziser (2012, 234)

What could the field of blue media studies be? Would it draw a visual economy of the ocean? Would it rely on media archaeology to uncover oceanic depths of media history, trace marine minerals in our technologies? Would it deploy cultural and textual studies to decode the meaning of the ocean's many cinematic representations? Would it, by necessity, speak about colonial and capitalist history, interrogate oceanic media events or spectacular "natural" catastrophes on our screens? Would it trace how the oceanic became virtual, speculate how we might become accustomed to swimming in digital waters with the Oculus Rift mounted on our heads? For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of ecological change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. Anxiety around our global commons, as David Suzuki describes natural resources, accelerates, fueled by an uneven distribution of wealth and the inability to imagine politics on a large scale (1997). A sense of inadequacy, the conviction that human perception cannot "process" the environmental collapse, is a key symptom of the current era, where the uneven allocation of environmental risk stems from global industrial development. It has been called the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), the Plasticocene (Chang 2016), the Capitalocene (Moore 2017), the Plantationocene (Haraway 2015), the White Supremacy Scene (Mirzoeff 2018), the Dithering (Robinson 2013), and the Sixth Extinction (Kolbert 2014). These terms—and many 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 record-breaking 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...