Taller: Seafloor Futures (ENG)

While the seafloors hold many stories, their futures are not yet told. In this submergent session, we will descend into three distinct ocean worlds by way of 3D seafloor models. Playing with 3D scanning, seafloor samples, and 3D deep ocean models, we’ll imagine seafloor futures during this speculative storytelling workshop. While creating material and corporeal narratives together, we will challenge the invisibility that the deep ocean and digital media both share. All workshop imaginings will later be woven into three 3D animation vignettes by Mae Lubetkin for their TBA21–Academy Ocean-Archive.org residency project Seafloor Futures: Science and Fictions in Deep Dimensions.

Perceiving the deep ocean is an imaginative act that begins with an image. Though we cannot crawl on benthic floors or swim through the abyssopelagic like its inhabitants do, we can still imagine this subsea world, under pressure and without light. Forming cultural imaginaries, oceanographic media is more-than-data and subsea vision is more-than-digital. Thinking through questions of mediation, access, and critical image-making, Mae Lubetkin activates their 3D-rendered seafloors as a base for collective futuring and anti-extractive imaginaries.

Workshop led by: Mae Lubetkin. Ocean scientist, writer, and artist. With remixed methods, they traverse disciplines and practices to understand our many relationships to bodies of water. Often at-sea, their scientific work is rooted in oceanography, volcanology, and imaging. Guided by fieldwork, creative experimentation, and thinking with the more-than-human, they approach making and writing through queer, anti-extractive, and decolonial frameworks. Their core practice is in solidarity with submerged, ancient, ephemeral, and imaginary environments. Assisted by: Michal Kucerak and Petra Linhartova, from TBA21

Workshop prerequisite: NO scientific background or technical skills are required. All are welcome.

Host or Publisher MMMAD Festival