The sixth episode, with writer, lecturer, and curator Filipa Ramos is an approach to cinema from the ocean and to the ocean from cinema. Beyond the production of underwater images, there is a political relationship between cinema and the underwater world. As vision devices, the projection room and the tank or aquarium are related in their production of the fiction of a safe environment for the human being. Moreover, there are aquatic creatures capable of producing cinematic images, allowing an expansion of the concept of cinema beyond its own history and human history. This podcast is the result of a ...

Previously in e-flux journal, we asked: In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word “power”? And then, just when you thought that you finally got the hang of how the power structures around you function, they seem to be coming undone … What is feminism, precisely? What are feminisms today? To examine these questions and myriad others, the previous and present issues of e-flux journal have been dedicated to feminism(s). It has been a particular pleasure to embark on an exploration and an unfolding of the many complex realities and iterations that feminisms can accommodate. Not one feminism, ...

Curiosity features writer, curator and lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW Filipa Ramos. Filipa Ramos is interested in how art engages with ecology and fosters relationships between humans, non-humans and machines. In this episode, as a memento to Marion von Osten whose engagement, curiosity and energy generated communities of people and things that resonated with one another in unexpected ways, Filipa Ramos shares the story of Jeanne Villepreux-Power, a naturalist who invented in 1832 the first recognizable glass aquarium to aid her observations…

Sonic Continuum (Mar 2020 – July 2021) traces practices of world-making through sound, both as a force that constitutes the world and a medium for producing knowledge about it.

What is Deep Sea Mining? Episode 1: Tools for Ocean Literacy is a cartographical survey of technologies that have contributed to ocean literacy and seabed mapping. Structured around a single shot along a vertical axis, the episode inquires about deep sea mining and the types of geologic formations where it is set to occur, particularly hydrothermal vents. Understanding the process of deep sea mining demands not only a temporal investigation – its main dates, legal and corporate landmarks, and scientific breakthroughs – but also a spatial axis connecting the seafloor to outer space cartographic technologies. After all, we know less about ...

Written by anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, What is Deep Sea Mining? Episode 2: Deep Frontiers is a brief history about knowledge of the deep sea and its resources. It highlights the ambiguity of this history, as depictions of the deep changed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, this knowledge informs discussions about the commercialization of biological and geological resources, with the deep sea fast becoming a zone of international dispute, opening up a debate about sustainable practices at sea. What is Deep Sea Mining? is a five episode web series dedicated to the topic of deep sea mining, a new frontier of resource extraction ...

The third episode of the web series What is Deep Sea Mining? is set on the Azores archipelago, an autonomous region of Portugal located in the North Atlantic Ocean. Composed of nine volcanic islands that once thrived on the whaling industry, the Azores have since become a hot spot for research in marine biology due to its diverse ecosystems, as it is located above an active triple junction between the Eurasian, African, and North-American tectonic plates. In 2008, one year before Portugal submitted its proposal to extend its continental shelf to the United Nations, the Canadian mining company Nautilus Minerals Inc. presented a ...

For the last two years we have been investigating deep sea mining, in an effort to both inform about and help to preempt this, for now hypothetical, industry. The jump from speculation to reality is, however, short. One could say that there is no deep sea mining industry. Rather, what is being pushed is a discourse, a language, and an imaginary (a speculation), creating the conditions for financial interests to establish this new economic frontier as unavoidable. Throughout this period of investigation, talking to different sources and reading from articles and documents ranging from economics and mining to biology and geology, ...