An Underwater World of Walls: Machine Sensing, Maritime Sovereignty, and the Aesthetics of Undersea Surveillance

Undersea surveillance systems are proliferating across the world at a rate unprecedented since the Cold War. The central components of these systems are arrays of hydrophones fixed to the ocean floor that convert the underwater acoustic environment into graphic readouts. Machine sensing not only allows states to project sovereignty into the ocean's depths, it also generates novel aesthetic practices. From the programming of hydrophones to target specific frequencies to interpreting the visual representations of captured acoustic signals, surveilling the ocean is now largely a matter of learning to read the ocean as it is sensed by machines.