Carolin Melia Brendel
marine media metabolisms
on (toxic) entanglements of digital infrastructures with marine ecosystems
How are digital infrastructures, as the technological foundations of digital capitalism, entangled with the planetary hydrosphere? Financialization practices of the deep ocean including maritime extraction of minerals from the deep sea to expand digital infrastructures, the polluting transfers of e-waste into aquatic environments and the bioleaching of e-waste by marine fungi are the vertices of this PhD.
The project is situated at the intersection of critical media art and theory, artistic research, queer-feminist science studies and the sociology of finance. Audiovisual artistic methods, geoscientific experiments and ethnographic fieldwork constitute the primary methods of the postdisciplinary and intraspecies research collaboration between a media artists, economic sociologists, geoscientists and marine fungi.
What kind of material-discursive framework and knowledge practices can be devised to intervene in the (toxic) onto-epistemological metabolisms between digital materialities and oceanic systems? The main objectives are firstly to analyze the operational logics, epistemologies and instruments of deep ocean extraction in a discursive-material way as well as factors that distort them and secondly to explore knowledge practices beyond extractivist reasoning by experimenting with these tools and cooperating with non-human creatures.
The envisioned research outcomes at this stage of the project are multiple mixed media installations that set up speculative artistic prediction models and develop scenarios for forms of value creation beyond the analysed extractivist financialization processes.
Supervised by Mona Schieren (University of the Arts Bremen) and Helen Pritchard (Academy of Arts Basel FHNW).