Technoetic Arts - Current Issue

Can shifting to tidal time potentially slow the catastrophic realities of sea-level rise? Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea is a site-specific performance during which Sunde stands in a tidal bay for a full cycle as water engulfs her body and then reveals it again. The public participates. What began in 2013 as a poetic impulse has grown into a complex series of nine durational performances involving communities around the world. In this article, durational performance artist and scholar Raegan Truax gleans insight from Indigenous feminist scholars and Indigenous women-led movements to analyse the choreographic and temporal dynamics of 36.5. Co-writing with the artist, and focusing specifically on Sunde’s durational shift to tidal time, Truax proposes a phenomenological undoing: ‘becoming Sea-swallowed’ as essential to the speculative possibility of ‘becoming otherwise’.

What is it to be the sea? Explorations of the constitution of the sea – what it comprises, where its borders are, how it incorporates novel entities – offer meaningful insights into the nature of boundaries and identity that are as relevant for humans as they are for the imperilled oceans. At the advent of the post-Anthropocene, when global processes perceptibly react to human impacts, this article elaborates on watery artistic investigations inspired by the mutability and permeability of seas. Anchoring its arguments in wide-ranging examples from transdisciplinary artistic practices, the article challenges conventional notions of boundaries and identity, proposing a new way of conceiving of the self, inspired for and by the seas: The Constitution of the Sea.

In this article, I unravel how my artistic research, focusing on the sonic spectrum, can reflect on interspecies perception and communication within the Aquatocene, an era marked by humanity’s deep involvement with aquatic environments. I coined the term Aquatocene to describe the state of waters in the Anthropocene. Through an interdisciplinary blending of art, science and technology, I examine the philosophical and methodological frameworks driving my artistic practice. With projects like Aquatocene and Atlantic Tales, I am to reimagine interspecies relationships while reflecting on life’s interconnectedness in aquatic realms. My work echoes that of artists Kat Austen, Kasia Molga, B. R. Shailesh and Marco Barotti, who also address environmental issues. Our shared mission is to foster dialogue, raise awareness and inspire action in response to ecological challenges. I suggest we need to reconsider how artists and researchers illuminate our relationship with the natural world, both above and beneath the waves. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, within my art practice, I navigate in the Aquatocene with reverence, humility and responsibility towards the myriad coexisting species. With this text, I aim to guide readers through my projects, sharing the theoretical and practical processes that explore multispecies sensory perception and communication in a (geo)political pursuit of love – an empathetic strategy to refine coexistence through sonic presence.

Both the sound and the sea are characterized by a constant fluidity and transformation, which has been considered as a creative foundation for expanded sonic practices that identify, capture and experiment with natural elements. The text aims to explore how the idea of sonification as a process of translating qualities and data into sound constitutes the departure point towards contemporary sound practices that encourage deeper listening and immersive experiences. Taking the sea-responsive sound installations of French artist Félix Blume, Rumors from the Sea and Suspiros as a foundation, the article presents a reflective conversation between Félix Blume and Bill Psarras on aspects of such artworks that highlight ideas of sea and limens, listening experience, sound ecology and sonic instruments through performative, inventive and participatory lenses.

The article proposes a re-interpretation of the shoreless seascape through a concept the author terms ‘aimlessness’. This concept can function as a hybrid metaphor suitable for investigating the failures of human transcendence. Essentially, every multidisciplinary practice in contemporary artistic, technological and scientific culture is a series of failed geopolitical setbacks. Related actions may well be reversed, interrupted or even recalled at any time with new acquisitions, discoveries or experiments. The understanding of the sea as a theatrical stage can offer spatial observatory mechanisms for decentred perspectives in order to decipher and invent contemporary notions and symbols that are floating into this hydro forest. The article develops a critical reflection based on a series of sea-oriented artworks. Drawing on the ubiquity of the water, these artworks – through representational and performative actions of drifting and floating – examine the concept of aimless floatation. Through an analysis of artistic methodologies interacting with water, the text offers a series of reflections on how such actions become performative, playful and open to unexpected circumstances that lie on the surface or the depths of the water world.

To think of the sea as a page is to consider its liquid surface as a site of writing. The current article explores fluid and performative aspects of the sea in contemporary art practices, which incorporate performance art, poetry and creative media. Based on a critical reflection on coastline and sea-oriented performances of the author and drawing on key ideas that consider the sea as a dynamic milieu of embodied knowledge and expanded creativity beyond western terrestrial bias, the article explores the author’s reconsideration of geopoetics through mediated, performative and fluid practices towards watery poetics in blue humanities. It reflects on the ways parallel processes of writing, floating, drifting and transmitting shift the meaning and articulation of a poem from the page to the sea towards an expanded poetic situation with coordinates.

At the heart of the ongoing climate crisis is the impact of anthropogenic activity on the oceans and the seas of the planet. The complexity and the scale of planetary changes, though, often feel elusive, or even unintelligible. This article aims to discuss the need to address the particularities and agency of the ocean, specifically exploring the role of art in empowering people to realize their bonds to the planet’s oceans and seas. After discussing the problematics of the long-established separation of land from sea, just like of culture from nature, the article presents theoretical positions that oppose these constructed binaries and approach oceans and seas as living bodies and at the same time as a medium. Four different artistic works are analysed with the goal to draw conclusions on how to live and be with the ocean, acknowledging its fluidity, diversity and complexity.

The world’s oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet’s surface and contain 97 per cent of the water on planet Earth. Saltwater connects with freshwater with the outflow of every river and creek or from the drift of thunderstorms across islands to form new oceans. With a shared theme of water, recent projects are discussed as case studies for their focus on ecosystem awareness, cultural knowledge, arts and science and working collaboratively. Water is an essential element and connector of ecosystems, species and spirituality – of life. The ability of water to change forms from liquid to solid to gas offers insights into acknowledging that changeability and adaptability are core to species survival on the planet Earth. It is proposed that by respecting the knowledge that is embedded in the element of water that greater wisdom can be shared which can benefit all life on this planet. With this aspiration in mind, the term OneWater is used to explore the relational aspect of water to consider its connective quality, between watersheds and species. This concept is used to shift views of anthropogenic impacts and embrace a fuller recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems and the role they play in evolving our understanding of the OneWater.