Program: Session IV
Session IV
Wed. 30 September
13:45–15:15
Ruuma (Linnanpuomi, ground floor)
Chair: Pia Maria Ahlbäck
Ilona Hongisto (University of Helsinki), Riikka Niemelä (University of Turku), Niina Oisalo (University of Turku) & Joonas Talvila (Univeristy of Helsinki)
Cinematic Imaginaries of Life Underwater
Ever since the 1910s filmmakers have gone to great lengths to take human vision under water to explore the depths and to create new imagery of the seas. The entwined development of modern diving equipment and film technology put cinema at the forefront of visualizing the underwater realm – an area inaccessible to humans without technological mediation. Providing unforeseen documentation of marine environments and unleashing novel dimensions of fantasy, cinema has contributed greatly to popular imagination of the underwater realm.
This paper offers a historical account of cinematic imaginaries of life underwater and asks how these imaginaries postulate human activity in the water. By tracing the history of underwater cinema, we map the historical arc of human activity in water and discuss its implications in the wider contexts of ecological sustainability and governance. Our specific point of entry to these discussions is human encounters with non-human others – including real and imaginary sea monsters, intelligent life forms and mysterious bioluminescent creatures. What would it mean to conceptualize human activity in the water through encounters with non-human others? What kinds of affordances of human action are postulated in these encounters?
The proposed paper includes a 3-minute video essay on cinematic encounters between humans and non-humans in the underwater realm. The video essay is currently in production, and it will be put on display in the upcoming permanent exhibition of The Finnish Maritime Museum (Vellamo) in Kotka.
Zuzanna Legan (University of Warsaw)
“A Song Throbbing Underwater”: Creative Practices of Attuning to Aquatic Conversations
In my paper, I will explore the way water challenges figurative language and invites other-than-human voices to interspecies dialogue. Following both creative and academic research, I will present the way aquatic environments inspire disorienting practices that result in shedding of logocentric, human exeptionalism. Drawing on thought shared in the correspondence between sonic researcher Ella Finer and interdisciplinary artist Vibeke Mascini – “Silent Whale Letters” – I propose seeing aquatic space as a first milieu through which humans absorb sound and that remains a “liminal space in which something is not yet worded” (Finer; Mascini, 2023), and thus open to other sources of meaning. Additionaly, I will present the text accompanying the Polish project “Liquid Tongues” performed in the form of installation during the 2026 Venice Biennale. In the project, artists translate songs of humpback whales to both phonic and sign language, bringing attention to alternative modes of communication. As both projects are created in response to accelerating effects of environmental destruction and silencing of entire ecosystems and cultures, they are focused on imaginative counter-practices that would make space for “the softer voices, neglected narratives, micro-memories” (https://labiennale.art.pl/en/wystawy/liquid-tongues/). Merging these projects with poetic explorations of the “not-yet-worded”, underwater audiosphere, I argue that in order to record a sense of loss (DeLoughrey, 2017; de Caires Taylor, 2014) and re-articulate our interspecies relationships (Skoulding, 2017), we need to put an ear to water and listen to the echoes resounding in it.
Jane Ruffino (Södertörn University)
Useful Beasts: Sharks, Sea Monster Narratives and Submarine Cables
When TAT-8, the first transoceanic subsea fiber optic cable, went into service in December 1988, US telecom giant AT&T released a 37-page press kit. Of this, five pages describe, in colorful language, some of the work that went into protecting the new, high-capacity telephone cable against shark attacks. This included adding a layer of steel tape as “fish bite protection.” By this time, it had been determined that sharks weren’t a persistent threat, but the extra layer of steel turned out to be useful protection against all sorts of abrasions on the seabed. The “fish bite” term just made for tastier media bait—and points to cultural and social understandings of the sea as a place of danger.
For decades, cable experts have been frustrated by media myths of sharks “eating the Internet”. And these stories continue to have an impact on the material culture of the industry. Since 2022, shark stories have been joined by public and political discourse dominated by fears of sabotage, bringing a new range of material and commercial entities aimed at neutralizing
alleged subaquatic threats.
This talk presents some contemporary archaeology research on submarine telecommunications cables, primarily on the shark-related research conducted during the development of TAT-8, as well as some of the things developed as a result of more recent iterations of these “sea monster” type narrative framings. It explores some of these multispecies entanglements, and presents some ways subaquatic danger narratives contribute to material culture relating to seas and oceans.
Alice Sundman (Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society)
Experiencing Underwater Milieus: Ocean Creatures and Anthropogenic Impact in Laline Paull’s Novel Pod
In her 2022 novel Pod, Laline Paull portrays an underwater world experienced from the points of view of creatures such as spinner dolphins, tursiops, and a wrasse. In their aquatic environment, living conditions change drastically due to human-caused phenomena in the form of oil spill, plastic debris, and industrial-scale fishing methods. The novel thus offers imaginings of aquatic other-than-human experiences of anthropogenic impact on the ocean.
Taking as points of departure theories of affective ecocriticism, in particular Alexa Weik von Mossner’s thoughts, building on neuroscientific insights, of how literary texts “invite” readers to “imagine” and “feel” narrative environments, events, and emotions (2017, 21; original emphasis), and ideas of how literary portrayal of other-than-human experience can be understood through “a double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization, human and non-human experientiality” (Bernaerts et al. 2014, 69), this paper seeks to explore the potential of Paull’s novel to invite readers to feel and understand the experiences of other-than-human ocean creatures impacted by large-scale human activity. Positing that literary narratives can impact readers’ emotions and attitudes and, by extension, influence real-world developments, the paper investigates how the novel presents other-than-human experiences of Anthropocene underwater milieus and the potential of these portrayals to prompt thinking and feeling with underwater creatures. Ultimately, then, the paper seeks to contribute to answering the question, posed by Sidney I. Dobrin, of “how … ocean representations teach us to know ocean” (2021, 11).