Dry Seas

in between data and mythology

2023-2024

When attempting to gaze and contemplate distant realities such as the seabed, a certain tension mediates our thoughts, between scientific data and fictional realities. Mythical representations of underwater space are methodologies which grant humans the possibility to contemplate realms which elude newtonian understandings of the world.

A bathymetry of the Mariana Trench, NOAA Bathymetric data viewer

In between these two ways of reading the world, there is a middle space, where scientific perspectives overlap with new and ancient mythologies. It is a place where humans fall through the grids of cartography, in between units of scale. A place which exists in the mind as much as it does in the physical world. On the bottom of the oceans lies the common denominator of geography and imagination.

The destruction of Leviathan, Gustave Doré (1832-83)

Watery space is opaque, and our understanding of it is mostly mediated by scientific methods of representation.

While cartographical representations and datasets provide extremely valuable resources, they are also intrinsically bound to their technologies of origin which mediate our relationships with the ocean. My interest with this work is to explore these mediations, include embodied experience and reflect on how we shape our understanding of distant places, in between the physical and the imaginary.

Benthic enviornments for centuries have been the resting place of human imagination, a last frontier, together with outer space, where monsters lie.

The process of exploring technical mediation began with cnc milling the seafloor of the Messina Strait, a space whose waters are dense in ancient mythologies which span thousands of years.
What slips through the acoustic signals of multibeam echosounders?