Project Summary

Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change (Deep Sea) is an interdisciplinary researcher project that brings humanities and social-science perspectives to bear on new and emerging marine technologies. The project asks how innovations in underwater sensors and robots open up a new frontier – the deep sea – for human exploration, expansion, and exploitation. It approaches marine technologies as media operations that institute new spaces of knowledge and action, and manage the human relationship with oceanic environments. The project examines the epistemic roles of these technologies, and their broader significance as enablers that allow the exploration of some of the last largely unknown areas on the planet for various types of purposes, ranging from new sources of food, energy, and minerals, via underwater cultural heritage, to environmental concerns relating to ocean heating and the imminent loss of marine biodiversity. The project investigates marine media operations along five interconnected lines: media-theoretical analyses of deep-sea remote sensing, marine-archaeological examinations of knowledge-production in unknown territories, social-anthropological ethnographies of control rooms for marine operations, art-historical investigations of the visual, historical, and economic dimensions of deep-sea explorations, and creative interventions that promote ocean literacy. The project is set up as a collaboration with the center of excellence Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (AMOS) and the Applied Underwater Robotics Laboratory (AUR-Lab) at NTNU. 

Objectives of the Project

The main objective of the Deep Sea project is to contribute new knowledge about marine technologies as a driving force in societal changes pertaining to the ocean and to how humans relate to marine environments. It seeks to understand how marine technologies institute new knowledge and action spaces, and how they manage the human relationship with oceanic environments. This objective is reached through five sub-objectives: (1) to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing marine image operations as instances of remote sensing; (2) to develop heuristics for knowledge production in unknown underwater territories; (3) to map the settings of marine control rooms and compare them to other control-room settings (e.g., space operations); (4) to provide a deeper historical understanding of the socio-economic implications of today’s deep-sea mining activities; (5) to develop ocean literacy through creative projects and digital publications.