Program: Session VII
Session VII
Thu. 1 October
11:00–12:30
Ruuma (Linnanpuomi, ground floor)
Chair: TBA
Laura-Marie Dehne (The University of Western Australia)
Engaging Technology: From Measuring to Understanding Whale Sharks?
Advances in marine science increasingly rely on technologies that extend human perception. In the study of whale sharks and other marine megafauna, the integration of uncrewed aerial vehicles (drones) and calibrated in-water video systems enables the reconstruction of 3D body models, from which body condition and mass can be measured. These metrics provide insight into individual health but also reflects the condition of the ecosystem these animals inhabit.
At the same time, this growing technological mediation raises fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of understanding. While such tools allow us to generate increasingly precise representations of the world, they may also distance us from the processes through which knowledge is produced, making us rely on outputs rather than engagement. This tension invites reflection on the limits and conditions of scientific understanding.
In this contribution, I reflect on my empirical work with whale shark photogrammetry to explore “understanding” as an ethical thick concept. I argue that understanding cannot be reduced to the accumulation of factual knowledge alone. Rather, it also involves an “understanding-with” that emerges through situated, embodied encounters with the more-than-human world. The human perspective is inherently partial, and this does not weaken scientific inquiry, it instead grounds it in humility and opens space for transdisciplinary approaches.
By bringing together scientific research and philosophical reflection, this work proposes a relational approach to conservation, in which care arises not only from what we factual know, but from how we come to understand and place
ourselves within shared environments.
Cecilia Lindhé (Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities)
Carving the Sea: Maritime Memoria and Bronze Age Rock Art
Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art (c. 1700–500 BCE) is deeply entangled with the sea. Thousands of carvings—dominated by ships, warriors, animals, and hybrid figures—were created along prehistoric coastlines, bays, and maritime corridors. Rather than approaching these images as static representations of seafaring life, this paper proposes that rock art sites functioned as mnemonic and pedagogical environments, enabling communities to engage with maritime knowledge through embodied practice, movement, and repetition in coastal landscapes.
Drawing on ancient rhetorical theory, the paper develops the concept of maritime memoria to explore how seafaring knowledge may have been structured, rehearsed, and transmitted. Using the rhetorical concepts of memoria (artificial memory), ekphrasis (vivid evocation), and ductus (directed movement), it argues that selected rock art sites operated as spatial frameworks for remembering and rehearsing maritime practices. Knowledge was not simply encoded in images but activated through bodily movement across rock surfaces and between sites, guided by repetition, variation, and spatial sequencing across the coastal terrain.
From this perspective, the carvings can be understood not only as images but as elements within performative landscapes where visual form, narrative imagination, and physical movement interacted. The sea thus appears not merely as motif or backdrop but as a formative presence shaping how knowledge was learned, rehearsed, and recalled. Rock art may therefore be understood as a material practice through which maritime experience, navigation, and seafaring identities were inscribed into the coastal landscape.
Inger-Anne Søfting (University of Southeastern Norway)
The Sea as Supermarket: Anthropocene Wilderness in Paul Lynch’s Beyond the Sea
My paper will focus on Paul Lynch’s novel Beyond the Sea (2020), which tells the dramatic story of the South American fishermen Bolivar and Hector who are caught unawares by a storm while out fishing in a panga boat. The two men are set adrift on the Pacific Ocean, ill-equipped for a long period at sea. While Hector after a few months succumbs to hopelessness and hardship, Bolivar perseveres and reaches a pacific island after more than a year at sea.
This paper will discuss how Lynch’s novel is comparable to other canonized maritime novels but also represents an Anthropocene break with them. It rubs literary shoulders with “small-boat texts,” like Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Its protagonist, Bolivar, shares with other literary mariners an admirable practical resourcefulness (Cohen, 2) that facilitates survival in dire straits at sea and the novel illustrates that “the ocean and seafaring are reminders of humanity’s profound entanglements with nature and the nonhuman” (Frank, 39). However, in Lynch’s novel, the nonhuman is not only represented by oceanic fish and fowl but also by vast amounts of plastic debris, some of it ingested by fish and birds, which leads Bolivar to comment that “the sea is like a supermarket” (Lynch, 46). My paper will discuss how Lynch’s novel as a traditional story of masculine survival at sea is subverted by its many nonhuman elements, such as “drift plastic” and the many animals killed by Bolivar in his struggle to survive.
Montana Torrey (Aalto University)
What Color Is the Cambrian Sky? Material Thinking with Cambrian Blue Clay
My research centers on an artistic research practice with Cambrian blue clay from Northern Estonia, formed over 500 million years ago. I use this material as a pigment to explore the performative aspects of deep-time atmospheres and the persistence of oceanic processes through painting. The project traces the transformation of Cambrian blue clay from sediment to pigment to painting, mirroring the geological forces that shaped its material being.
As a pigment, Cambrian blue clay carries the spatio-temporal landscape of the North Baltic Klint, producing an iron-rich blueish-green horizon marking a paleo-atmosphere in which earth, sea, and sky remain entangled in the clay’s material language. Painting with this material extends geological temporalities into another visual field of human-water relations, situating the act of painting within deep time, the agency of blue matter and its ongoing circulations and reframes the poetics of thinking through matter.
This paper presents a narration of the lifecycle of the clay from geological formation to its historical and present-day extraction in Kunda, Estonia. By linking pigment to industrial resource, particularly its use in cement and clinker production. This research project examines how the remnants of an ancient shallow epicontinental sea become reactivated through a circulatory process. Combining artistic research with the Blue Humanities’ oceanic turn, this project offers a material and temporal rethinking of the Baltic Sea, blue matter, deep time, and artistic practice.