R/V: Research Vessel
2025-present
This visual research focuses on the quotidian tasks, non-spectacular (even monotonous) forms of labor, and the everyday practices and instruments of doing scientific research at sea. My attention to the overlooked aspects of the “research vessel” (maritime abbreviation: R/V) brings into relief the visual history of oceanography, which tends to operate within what we might call a blue box. Echoing Bruno Latour’s adoption of the black box—a mainstay object of science and technology studies—the blue box is field-specific to the unique social, technical, and environmental circumstances of oceanic knowledge-making generated through oceanographic expeditions. For Latour and numerous other STS scholars, laboratories typically are microcosmic sandboxes where scientists generate referential knowledge about an external world. Oceanographers, however, are adept at turning the outside (i.e., the ocean) into a laboratory, working in or around the sea by carrying the laboratory's forms, structures, and protocols with them. The mundane platforms, drafting tables, and everyday instruments of the lab thus figure as mobile and scalable infrastructures, or vessels, for making the blue box and doing the “graphic” work of oceanographic research—that is, writing, drawing, and modeling the ocean.
Through a montage of newly created and archival media, this essay film seeks different ways of looking into, if not opening up, oceanography’s blue box. In doing so, the project takes a critical stance toward the over-instrumentalization of hybrid practices of art and science by turning attention toward the instruments and operations of a research vessel. Using participatory ethnographic and visual arts research methods (including photography, video, and sound recording), R/V continues prior work that I have pursued in laboratories and at coastal field sites of observing, attending, and assisting (where helpful) with marine ecological experiments. Visual materials and media collected during oceanographic survey cruise will be used to create a visual montage of the links and affinities between shipboard workers and their tools and actions within the research vessel’s apparatus. By inhabiting a research vessel—a heterotopia modified and bounded by scientific logic—this project investigates how the techniques deployed in maritime navigation and marine science shape, and in some cases determine, how ocean environments are socially assembled, perceived, and (mis)understood.
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