I have been playing around with the Erdas software creating a series of profiles representing an outline of the terrain traversed when journeying from one point on the seabed to another. My first experiments involved a ‘walk’ from Lands End to New York followed by a ‘hike’ down the mid Atlantic Ridge.

The image included here shows the route taken by the Nautilus submarine during its journey of 20,00 leagues, laid out in one sequence. I am thinking about creating panoramas or friezes of some kind using these profiles.

Somewhere in my mind I have the image of the seas peeled away from the earth like the flayed skin of anatomical Ecorche.

I have also been exploring the possibilities offered by cutting out different oceans and extruding them – as in this image  of the Mediterranean (bottom right) - the boot of Italy is visible in the top centre. I am now getting some of these files translated into 3d form using a 3d printer to see what the results look like.

Doing this exercise has brought up the question of where the boundaries lie between one ocean and the other - seemingly they frequently follow the pattern of the undersea plate boundaries and I have considered using these as basis for isolating one from the other. It also occurs to me to make a series of ‘models’, which expand the existing territorial boundaries of different countries to take account of undersea claims they are making, extending Canada for example into the arctic by an additional 750,000 square kilometers

More generally the question of what I might ‘do’ at NOCS is surfacing more frequently. Up until now I have been gathering information, learning new processes, forming contacts etc and this will continue for some while, I need to let the situation work on me, to absorb record and process the information I am being given access to. Tim and I were talking about the work we have done together so far, he was saying how important he felt it was to make a departure from the usual visual conventions of scientific modelling. I agree but at the same time its important to me not to simply produce material, which while it might be aesthetically pleasing, bears no logical or conceptual relationship to the source or context in which it was generated. I want to have a dialogue with something bigger than my own preoccupations or tastes. At the same I keep returning to the conundrum of wanting to give form to something the ineffability of which is precisely what attracts me to it. The scale of the material I am trying to synthesise appears impossible sometimes, making some kind of imaginative, allegrorical reading, which  combines creative license with 'hard' information seem the only appropriate way forward.