Subversive Submersives: the unseen infrastructures of the Southern Ocean

Keywords: urban, planetary, ocean, Southern Ocean, infrastructure, underwater autonomous vehicles
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 28

Abstract

Though perceived as pristine, the Southern Ocean is urbanising and has been for some time. Views of the high seas as uncultivated and uninhabitable neglect evidence of urban processes in these spaces; just as popular representations of the Antarctic as remote and untouched do little for critical discussion of its oceanic volume. These environments often fail to appear in discourses of contemporary urbanisation and key to this disregard is the matter of their representation. Registering how the urban is invisible in the ocean—and how the ocean is unseen in the urban—is made more urgent given its critical role regulating the planet’s atmosphere. This inquiry is sited in the infrastructural landscape of the Southern Ocean: the world’s ‘newest’ and most vulnerable ocean, host to unexpected intersections between water, science, governance, agents, and others. New technologies expanding into this space (like AUVs for research and resource speculation) prompt a reconsideration of planet-scaled infrastructures, where intelligences operating for thinly-veiled commercial benefit within the ocean generate complex legal, ecological, and moral concerns; and signal an escalation of destructive processes to sustain the scientific, geopolitical, and commercial ambitions of populations on dry land. No longer 'remote wilderness', the Southern Ocean is instead a vast field embedded with technology and, significantly, unseen. This paper re-presents the Southern Ocean, using cartographic and non-representational practices to cross-examine the urbanising ocean. For underneath the machinery of resource extraction and exploitation in the ocean lie significant questions regarding the urban as it is represented outside usual conventions of the city.