Listening to the Ocean
PANEL 20
Listening to the Ocean
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
2:45 am - 4:15 pm
Location: ROOM 101A
Panel Speakers:
Jeroen Boom
Yolande Harris
Dot Kwek
Moderated by: Ryan Stillwagon
A Sea of Noise
Jeroen Boom
Noise makes nauseas, it disorients and undoes thought. Because it lacks a stable form, noise cannot be put into words or received as a recognisable image. Noise is as elusive as the sea, as its formless disorder evades and slips through our mental capacities that try to make sense of it or arrest it in its continuous movement. This paper revolves around the concept of noise as connected to the oceanic. It will focus on two filmic works, Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed’s poetic film Purple Sea and Forensic Architecture’s video investigation Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea, which have documented the same tragic shipwreck on the southern maritime border of Europe, but from different perspectives and for opposite intentions. Going from an affective structure to a container of counterevidence, moving from film theatres and art exhibitions to international courts, in these video works, noise excites new modes of relating and destabilises monopolised modes of vision. The images in this paper use oceanic noise as a disruptive force to embrace, as a point of departure into trajectories of thinking and imagining otherwise.
Jeroen Boom is a doctoral candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen and interested in the politics of the image. His dissertation focusses on disruptive gazes in experimental essay documentaries about European migration, analysing how these works deconstruct and go against standard mechanisms of looking. He is also coordinator of the research group ‘Critical Humanities’ at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History (RICH) and teaches various courses on film and visual culture.
That Unseen Vibrance – Listening to the Ocean
Yolande Harris
That Unseen Vibrance explores the role of sound in generating a sense of oceanic consciousness. It imagines an entwined sonic future of humans and ocean creatures, where our attentive, conscious listening affects the world around us. My art practice involving ocean sound, video and data provides direct experience of the ideas, including a sound walk Melt Me Into The Ocean (2018), a video installation using video and sounds from tagged whales in From a Whale’s Back (2020), and my most recent highly resonant sound work which presents the oceanic through dense vibrations, larger than our bodies, larger than our eardrums, sounds that work through us, in That Unseen Vibrance (2021). Through these audio visual experiences I set up hope that an expanded sonic imagination can contribute to re-balancing human relationships to our environments. The paper explores recent research into the effects of sound on ocean life, still relatively unknown in comparison to other forms of ocean pollution. The pandemic-induced ‘Anthropause’ in human activity, when oceans and land became suddenly and significantly quieter, offered both a window into possible sonic futures, and importantly, an opportunity to reflect back and hear ourselves more clearly. Sound is the harbinger of such a renewed relatedness. I explore ideas of intergenerational oceans, whole body experiences of sounds beyond the human scale, and ways of experiencing data including sonification, mapping, tagging of ocean animals and AI techniques. How do such approaches and entwinements with technology and ocean (animal) cultures through a sonic sensibility, help us re-orient perspectives through these experiences?
Yolande Harris (UK/US) explores ideas of sonic consciousness, using sound and image to create intimate visceral experiences that heighten awareness of our relationship to the environment and other species. Her projects on underwater sound encourage connection, understanding and empathy with the ocean. Yolande is Associate Researcher and lecturer in digital media art and environmental sound at University of California Santa Cruz and lecturer in digital media art at San Jose State University. Previously Assistant Professor in film/animation/video at Rhode Island School of Design, she has held major research fellowships at Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Jan van Eyck Academy, Netherlands Institute for Media Arts and UCLA Art|Sci Center. She presents her work internationally, including Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the House of World Cultures Berlin, the Exploratorium in San Francisco and Ars Electronica Festival. Yolande studied at Edinburgh University, Dartington College of Arts, has an MPhil from Cambridge University and a PhD from Leiden University.
Thalassic Tangles Amid Archipelagic Interstices
Dot Kwek
This transdisciplinary thought-experiment-as-paper traces complex circuits binding capital, desire, and (post/)colonial diasporas through a thalassic vision. We shall have to pass through the cunning of imperial-capitalist reason, and how it enjoins differential thalassic traversals to enable and accelerate death and extraction in the name of profit. Yet it is upon the counterpoints that we will dwell, the aquatic suspension that creates a chance of catching a fugitive wind and the poesis of new modes of relationality. The paper transposes the thought of Black and Afro-Caribbean thinkers (Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, et al) on Middle Passage onto other seas. We will explore the potentialities as well as the limits of such transpositions. At the urging of my grandmother’s ghost, our transposition will focus on the South China Sea, which she traversed as a child to seek life (never ‘just’ work) in a British colony, a journey of which she seldom spoke, a memory too late and impossible to recover. Hers is but a sea-strand of myriad silences that challenge re-membering, return, origins, and belonging of ocean-born diasporas, silences I explore with the aid of authors such as Saidiya Hartman, Herman Melville, and Julius S. Scott.
Born in a postcolonial moment, Dot Kwek holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins, and currently teaches at Cardiff University.