panel:

Archive Metabolism: Erosion, Acidification and Oblivion by oceans and/as archives

Alejandro Limpo González, Andrew Gowers, Nina Halton-Hernandez, Scarlet Clark & Fiona Middleton

How do oceans exist as archives? What do archival epistemologies and mediations have to say about power, knowledge, and space? Our presentation raises these questions through a visual essay produced at the UK National Oceanography Centre (NOC). We bring archival materials from NOC and theoretical tools from the humanities and social sciences to reflect on the material imagination of ocean archives. We attend to the metabolic processes that digest materials (silver salts, wood, cellulose, and electro-magnetic particles) such as erosion, pollution, and oblivion within the archive. We develop a processual approach that displaces oceans as scientific objects towards technical operations of data control and stabilization (cooling, calibration, standardization). We engage with the ocean-archive entrapment by unfolding two lines of inquiry, and two different types of archives. First, we enquire how archival epistemologies organizing expedition records, logbooks, and technical documents from decades of exploration and ocean science at NOC territorialize the volumetric nature of oceanic environments into different material surfaces. We will interrogate colonial politics and state power via these scientific materials. Here, we propose a critical dialogue within the space of the archive, looking in parallel at seascapes as flattened records of prior oceans, envisioned through scientific abstractions. Our second speculation approaches contemporary information-based archives that capture oceans as records of planetary change, algorithmically stimulated to imagine (and image) biogeochemical conditions for future habitability. We will develop an eco-critical engagement with oceans in and beyond earth by looking to archives of an ancient acidic ocean on Mars, offering deeper complications to the intermixing of ocean and archive.

Alejandro Limpo Gonzalez, Andrew Gowers, Nina Halton-Hernandez, Scarlet Clark and Fiona Middleton are PhD researchers at the University of Southampton, working together as part of ‘Intelligent Oceans’ – an interdisciplinary Leverhulme-funded doctoral programme based at the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute (SMMI) and National Oceanography Centre (NOC). Using transdisciplinary methods to bridge the arts, humanities, natural and social sciences, Intelligent Oceans has a particular interest in critical and speculative views of the ocean. Our aim is to expand ways of engaging with society’s most pressing oceanic issues related to the climate crisis and planetary habitability.