Goggle Earth Goes underwater
This week amid a flurry of media coverage Goggle Earth issues an update, which allows viewers to navigate the deep-sea bed.
My own attempts - clumsy no doubt - to use this facility afford the exhilarating experience - and it is strangely physical - of crashing down towards and through the sea’s surface into an environment which is strangely reminiscent of some of the undersea scapes I have been producing using the Erdas modelling software
What is strikes me most forcibly is level of visibility it assumes. In parallel I am editing some video footage shot at a depth of between 2,500 to 3,000 metres which makes evident the difficulty of seeing anything beyond that which might be illuminated by the beam of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) (an area of approx 9-16 sq metres). No horizon is visible confounding immediately one of the primary pictorial conventions of landscape. The other surprise perhaps is the constant stream of snow like debris that falls through the water to rest on the bottom and which as soon as it is touched swirls up dramatically, obscuring the view. For me this powerfully evokes the depth involved while for the scientists I am working with it is a source of extreme frustration .
I remember when I was producing work in response to the site of a wrecked boat at Prawle Point in Devon, putting the camera (see Above and Below this page) in waterproof a housing and allowing the tide to animate the camera as a means to embed within the work a trace of the circumstances in which it was made. By the same token this dark, awkward, footage excites me because of the echo it offers of the physical the space of the deep sea bed and the resitance it offers to the attemtp of the camera to reveal it.
Sitting in the video archive at National Oceanography Centre watching this footage I am awed by the hours and hours of tape held there, all of which must be painstakingly logged. I read the entries which record sightings of a purple anemone, small sponge, vase bug etc In this world, which is so vast and lacking in familiar landmarks a mussel shell serves as an provides an important point of orientation
Returning to Goggle Underwater I find myself thinking about the virtual world it conjures and the ways in which this in turn shapes our perception of the actual world. I can’t help feeling that despite the wealth of data on which it draws, Goggle Underwater represents a making of the world in our image, which is as much scenic as it is scientific.
Submersion Dive Training Centre - Oban 2005
Bathymetric Map 1919 (detail)
Three dimensional model Atlantic coast off North West Africa
Sonar back scatter map - Cape Verde Islands
Truthing Gap is a project, which involves research into
undersea environments and related human activity, that I have been
working on for a number of years and which runs in parallel with
the Submersion Series. It
is driven by an interest in the ways in which the sub maritime
might be thought of as of extra geographic and existing 'outside'
of culture.
I am currently Artist in Residence (funded by the Leverhulme Trust)
at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, one of the
world's top five oceanographic research institutions, working with
sonar geophysicist
Dr Tim Le Bas exploring methods of seabed mapping and undersea
survey. The project will explore the play of myth, imagination and
objectivity, involved in envisaging environments that cannot be
directly experienced, probing issues of knowledge production,
perception and the nature of the scientific gaze.
Truthing Gap originates from an earlier cycle of works investigating different coastal locations and the ways in which they might be said to constitute a border zone, between for example, civic and natural. Following the encircling of a shadow 2001 I began to speculate about the idea of 'passing over the edge' and entering not only another element but also a space which might be thought of as culturally and psychologically 'other'. Around the same time the chance discovery of a historical bathymetric (undersea) map of the world (see image) in which the seabed was revealed as a region with its own distinctive contours and plains, left me fascinated by the looking glass world into which it provided a glimpse.
Currently the deep seabed constitutes the largest yet least
known environment on the planet, a space whose histories are
geological rather than social, one which is never the less subject
to rapidly accelerating economic, political and ecological
pressures. Problems of depth and visibility necessitate that
undersea surveys be made using sonar, rather than optically, a
circumstance which might be said to place the deep ocean at one
remove from the post enlightenment drive to render the world as
observable phenomena. The work of Dr Le Bas and his colleagues
seeks to minimize the challenges posed by such locations to
attempts to map them, painstakingly cleaning and re-modelling raw
data to achieve recognisable forms. For me this process and the
visual practices to which it give rise are fascinating. Incidents
such as the recent use, by Russian broadcasters, of footage from
the film Titanic, within reports of undersea territorial claims
(symbolized by the planting of a flag on the seabed 14,000 feet
beneath the North Pole), suggest a collapsing of real and imaginary
which make this dialogue particularly timely.Technically the term
'truthing gap' refers to the necessity to verify sonar data with
other findings, here it refers to the question of what we 'see'
when looking at undersea environments and how our perceptions are
formed.
The work we propose to do has a number of strands, including the
fabrication of physical, as opposed to virtual, models in different
materials; the production of annotated maps which contextualise the
environments being surveyed economically, politically and
culturally and the staging of a programme of readings, screenings
and lunchtime seminars, at NOCS designed to prompt reflection on
the work being undertaken, from a cultural and imaginative as well
scientific perspective.
The last two images on this page show samples of bathymetric maps created by Dr Le Bas
Commissioned: Hull Time Based Arts, Exhibited: Beverley Art Gallery, Yorkshire 1997
Exhibited: Museum of Installation, London. 2000
A selection from a larger body of images, culled from the internet using the word underwater as a search term, first presented as a slide show at Earth and Ocean Day at the National Oceanography Centre, March 09.
Ranging from 19th century illustrations of Jules Verne's 20,000.00 Leagues Under the Sea, to designs for the proposed Poseidon Mystery Island underwater resort, they chart the emergence of the undersea within visual culture, revealing an increasing drive towards its domestication and a loss of the awe and foreboding that initially characterised such images.
Also notable is the extent to which women seem to both figure within and comfortably inhabit the undersea world.
