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<p>Dwelling with the alterity of the deep sea, my dissertation, "Wild Blue Media:
Thinking Through Seawater," considers how the ocean environment produces cognitively
estranging conditions for conceptualizing media and media theory. Concepts in media
theory have thus far exhibited what I call a "terrestrial bias," theorizing primarily
dry technologies through a language whose metaphorics have developed through human
lives lived on land, rather than in the volume of the sea. In order to better understand
the "terrestrial bias" in media theory, I develop a critical method of "conceptual
displacement" that involves submerging key concepts in media theory underwater, engaging
both literary texts and digital media. Specifically, I turn to Vilém Flusser's speculative
fiction text "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" to rethink "inscription"; ocean data visualizations
to rethink "database"; and Jacques Cousteau's diving narratives to rethink "interface."
Focusing on the ocean expands the critical discussion of the relation between embodiment
and knowledge taken up by feminist science studies, and necessitates the inclusion
of the environmental conditions for knowing; our milieu determines the possibilities
of our media, and the way that we theorize our media in language. The ocean thus serves
as an epistemic environment for thought that estranges us from our terrestrial habits
of perception and ways of speaking about media, providing an important check on the
limits of theory and terrestrial knowledge production, compelling us to have the humility
to continually try to see--and describe--differently. </p><p>Turning to the ocean
to rethink concepts in media theory makes apparent the interrelation between technology,
desire, ecology, and the survival of human communities. While media theory has long
been oriented toward preservation and culture contexts of recording, studying media
in ocean contexts requires that we consider conditions that are necessarily but contingently
ephemeral. Yet to engage with the ephemeral is also to engage with issues of mortality
and the desire towards preservation--of what we want to remain--a question that especially
haunts coastal communities vulnerable to sea-level rise. What the ocean teaches us,
then, is to reflect on what we want our media technologies to do, as well as the epistemological
question of how we are habituated to see and perceive. By considering the ocean as
a medium and as an estranging milieu for reconsidering media concepts, I argue for
an expanded definition of "media" that accounts for the technicity of natural elements,
considering how media futures are not only a matter of new digital innovations, but
fundamentally imbricated with the archaic materiality of the analog.</p>
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