Ocean Sensing and Navigating the End of this World

Harun Farocki (with Matthias Rajmann), Parallel I–IV (2012–14).

Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Douglas J. McCauley, Malin L. Pinsky, Stephen R. Palumbi, James A. Estes, Francis H. Joyce, and Robert R. Warner, “Marine Defaunation: Animal Loss in the Global Ocean,” Science 347, no. 6219, 1255641 (January 16, 2015), DOI: 10.1126/science.1255641.

For an extended investigation into the topic of sensing practices, see the forthcoming special issue “Sensors and Sensing Practices: Reworking Experience across Entities, Environments and Technologies,” eds. Jennifer Gabrys, Helen Pritchard, and Lara Houston, Science, Technology & Human Values (2019).

For example, see National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, “A Global Map of Human Impacts.” Not to be confined to surface views of the ocean, Google Earth has also added a “Street View” for navigating underwater—see → and →.

Evan A. Howell, Steven J. Bograd, Carey Morishige, Michael P. Seki, and Jeffrey J. Polovina,“On North Pacific Circulation and Associated Marine Debris Concentration,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 65, nos. 1–3 (2012): 16–22.

Kathleen Dohan and Nikolai Maximenko, “Monitoring Ocean Currents with Satellite Sensors,” Oceanography 23, no. 4 (2010): 94–103; International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), “Tracking Ocean Debris,” Newsletter of the International Pacific Research Center 8, no. 2 (2008): 14–16 →; Southeast Atlantic Marine Debris Initiative (SEA-MDI), “Want to Track Marine Debris? There’s an App for That” →.

Marine Traffic →; Thingful →.

Justin Gillis, “In the Ocean, Clues to Change,” New York Times, August 11, 2014 →. See also Jennifer Gabrys, “Sink: The Dirt of System,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, issue 4 (2009), 666–81; and Jennifer Gabrys, “Plastic and the Work of the Biodegradable,” in Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, eds. Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael (Routledge, 2013), 208–27.

Stefan Helmreich, “Intimate Sensing,” in Simulation and Its Discontents, ed. Sherry Turkle (MIT Press, 2009), 148. See also Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009).

UK Argo, “Deep Profile Floats” →.

Nikolai Maximenko, Jan Hafner, and Peter Niiler, “Pathways of Marine Debris Derived from Trajectories of Lagrangian Drifters,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 65, nos. 1–3 (2012): 51–62.

Rick Lumpkin and Mayra Pazos, “Measuring Surface Currents with Surface Velocity Program Drifters: The Instrument, Its Data, and Some Recent Results,” in Lagrangian Analysis and Prediction of Coastal and Ocean Dynamics (LAPCOD), eds. Annalisa Griffa, A. D. Kirwan, Arthur J. Mariano, Tamary Ozgokmen, and Thomas Rossby (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39–67.

Newsroom UNSW (University of New South Wales, Australia), “Our Plastics Will Pollute Oceans for Hundreds of Years,” January 9, 2013 →.

Dohan and Maximenko, “Monitoring Ocean Currents with Satellite Sensors”; Laurent C. M. Lebreton, S. D. Greer, and Jose Carlos Borrero, “Numerical Modeling of Floating Debris in the World’s Oceans,” Marine Pollution Bulletin 64, no. 3 (2012): 653–61; Maximenko, Hafner, and Niiler, “Pathways of Marine Debris.”

Erik van Sebille, Matthew H. England, and Gary Froyland, “Origin, Dynamics, and Evolution of Ocean Garbage Patches from Observed Surface Drifters,” Environmental Research Letters 7, no. 4 (2012), DOI: 10.1088/1748–9326/7/4/044040.

Rick Lumpkin, Nikolai Maximenko, and Mayra Pazos, “Evaluating Where and Why Drifters Die,” Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 29, no. 2 (2012): 300–08.

Stefan Helmreich, “Nature/Culture/Seawater,” American Anthropologist 113 (2011): 132–44; Isabelle Stengers, “A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 4 (2008): 91–110.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Sacha Loeve, Alfred Nordmann, and Astrid Schwarz, “Matters of Interest: The Objects of Research in Science and Technoscience,” Journal for General Philosophical Science 42, no. 2 (2011): 365–83.

Jessica Lehman, “A Sea of Potential: The Politics of Global Ocean Observations,” Political Geography 55 (2016): 113–23. In her analysis of ocean governance, Lehman draws on Elizabeth Povinelli’s geontopolitics. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2016).

Tom Holert, “Meshed Space: On Navigating the Virtual,” in Myths of the Marble, eds. Milena Hoegsberg and Alex Klein (Sternberg Press, 2018).

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 41.

See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1995); and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 703–12.

Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, nos. 1–2 (2018), 224–42. As Whyte writes: “Some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges.” Or as Kathryn Yusoff writes: “The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.” See A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

Moten states: “Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.” In Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013), 118.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2015): 85–86.

Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Polity Press, 2017).