by Prof. Dr. Jörn Etzold (Spokesperson), Dr. des. Ruth Schmidt (Scientific Coordination)
Project in conceptual phase by Dr. des. Ruth Schmidt (Postdoctoral researcher)
Against the backdrop of the growing interest in media and cultural studies in the sea as a mode of thinking or as a medium, the articulation of a “water-centric thinking” (Mentz 2023), and approaches from hydrofeminist and decolonial perspectives, the project explores infrastructures that open up the sea as a space of expanded ecologies. Building on analyses of the ocean as permeated by architecture and (colonial) infrastructures, the project examines various aquatic infrastructures that accompanied the Western colonization and economization of the seas, yet generated a different imaginary. These range from the early large aquariums of the 1850s, which emerged in the context of the London World Exhibition and can be understood as the first in-vitro ecologies, through the fantastical-seeming plans and research for the dolphin–human city “Dolphin Embassy” pursued by the Californian architecture collective Ant Farm from 1975 onward, to the military–dolphin infrastructures of the Cold War and their queer-feminist reappropriations as the Cosmodolphin. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aquatic infrastructures thus emerged that conceive of the ocean as a conceptual space for experimental ecologies while simultaneously engaging with the logics of state power and representation at sea.
See also:
by Prof. Dr. Jörn Etzold (Spokesperson), Dr. des. Ruth Schmidt (Scientific Coordination)
Project in conceptual phase by Dr. des. Ruth Schmidt (Postdoctoral researcher)
Against the backdrop of the growing interest in media and cultural studies in the sea as a mode of thinking or as a medium, the articulation of a “water-centric thinking” (Mentz 2023), and approaches from hydrofeminist and decolonial perspectives, the project explores infrastructures that open up the sea as a space of expanded ecologies. Building on analyses of the ocean as permeated by architecture and (colonial) infrastructures, the project examines various aquatic infrastructures that accompanied the Western colonization and economization of the seas, yet generated a different imaginary. These range from the early large aquariums of the 1850s, which emerged in the context of the London World Exhibition and can be understood as the first in-vitro ecologies, through the fantastical-seeming plans and research for the dolphin–human city “Dolphin Embassy” pursued by the Californian architecture collective Ant Farm from 1975 onward, to the military–dolphin infrastructures of the Cold War and their queer-feminist reappropriations as the Cosmodolphin. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aquatic infrastructures thus emerged that conceive of the ocean as a conceptual space for experimental ecologies while simultaneously engaging with the logics of state power and representation at sea.
See also: