How to care about coral rubble: deep sea cameras, cinematic realism, and mourning via mediated encounter

ABSTRACT This article analyses camera systems utilized in deep sea science, focussing on surveys and representations of deep sea coral devastated by trawl fishing in the South Pacific. Various custom, advanced camera technologies are used by governmental and non-governmental science agencies, including Australia’s CSIRO and Aotearoa New Zealand’s NIWA, to record footage of the deep water and the ocean floor in aid of monitoring marine ecosystems and tracing environmental transformation. This footage is often also deployed in science communication, being utilized in promotional videos and livestreamed online. This article locates such camera systems among an array of cinematic antecedents, adjacent contemporary camera technologies, and film-theoretical notions including underwater cinemas, naturecams, and Bazanian realism in order to investigate their capacities as a technology of and for discovery, documentation, and exploration that also manages affective aspects of human-nonhuman encounter. A film studies approach to the work of the camera makes possible an understanding of how, by mediating an encounter for human viewers with abyssal lifeforms on the edge of ecological extinction, it sets in motion the potential for an ethics of care to emerge across time, space, and species.

of ruination: personal ruin, the ostensibly random ruin of natural disaster, and the ruin of ecological extinction.The film's representation of coral thus conforms with Joshua Schuster's observation that coral has become 'a cultural icon' and a locus for multiple, sometimes conflicting ideas including 'fragility and resilience ' (2019, 85), and 'enchantment and extinction' (Schuster 2019, 87).Tracey explains that solenosmilia, the deep sea coral she studies, grows at a rate of one millimetre a year.If it is able to regenerate and support an ecosystem as it once did, then this will happen far in the future -after the end of Tracey's own life, and the lives of contemporary viewers.Via the film's poetic framing her scientific survey comes to seem like a painstaking, impossible vigil; an effort to care for another future world she will never inhabit; a honing of alertness to the potential for survival in an abyssal environment made thoroughly inhospitable by violent, extractive human enterprise.
On an Unknown Beach's underwater footage is captured by a custom-made camera apparatus, a 'Deep Towed Imaging System,' used by Aotearoa's NIWA (2022).Connected by a wire, it is towed behind a ship to record and relay a live HD video feed to shipboard scientists.Cameras like this are used by many scientific organizations, including Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) whose 'Seamount Corals Survey 2018' (2020) used a towed camera system to survey the Tasmanian Seamounts -a region that, like the Chatham Rise, is home to deep sea coral decimated by bottom trawling for orange roughy, which peaked during a period of intensified fishing in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Clark 2001).
As camera technology has advanced footage of this kind has become more publicly accessible.Scientific missions like these are often livestreamed, and their observations of deep sea environments are catalogued online.CSIRO's Seamounts Coral Survey was livestreamed via Twitch (Blogging the Seamounts) and is documented in various ways, including a blog (Kikken 2018) and a five part video series uploaded to YouTube that cuts imagery of the seafloor together with interviews and footage of scientists at work (Marine Biodiversity Hub 2020).My own protracted encounter with livestreamed deep sea exploration occurred some time after viewing On an Unknown Beach and researching NIWA's and CSIRO's cameras, when I regularly livestreamed Schmidt Ocean Institute's 'Visioning the Coral Sea' expedition via YouTube (now preserved in entirety as a playlist (Schmidt Ocean Institute 2020)) during Melbourne's grey months of May and June in 2020, as a COVID-19 outbreak took hold.From my apartment, I shared the perspective of ROV SuBastian as it descended off the coast of Queensland thousands of kilometres away, roving ponderously across the seafloor for hours at a time, slowly revealing murky environs and pausing to linger on crevasses, mounds of sand, and colourful creatures.
This article explores deep sea cameras like these and the images they make possible from a cinematic perspective, posing them alongside several distinct cognates for thinking about cinematic practice and theory in relation to the deep sea, animals, and largescale catastrophe.It works towards an understanding of how this type of advanced camera technology functions beyond its purview of producing scientific knowledge to facilitate and orient a mediated encounter between human viewers and deep sea life (in this instance, coral).Amidst these cognates, considerations of cinematic realism of the sort posed by French post-war film theorist André Bazin make possible an understanding of how the camera's straightforward capacity to record might tie in to an ethics of intimate attentiveness, occasioning feelings of proximity and processes of care and mourning.
I argue that cinematic aesthetics and ethics may thus engender attunement to pervasive processes of despoliation, ecological degradation, and potential recovery that, occuring at great depth and on timescales that exceed humans, usually remain hidden from our view.

Deep sea cameras as cinema of encounter
Deep sea cameras are positioned as a component in arrays of cutting-edge technology that make possible new (for humans) ways of percieving oceanic life and death.ROV SuBastian is equipped with at least six cameras and 'Full Spectrum LED Lighting' alongside four 'Core System Sensors,' multiple modular 'Add-On System Sensors,' a sampling system, and sonar systems (Schmidt Ocean Institute 2021).A webpage detailing CSIRO's Deep Tow Camera System lists still and video cameras alongside sensing technologies such as a pressure sensor and 'CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) and dissolved oxygen sensor system,' and the system's capacities for precise, durational observation are extolled in revelatory terms when it is described as 'an unparalleled stereo camera system that changes the way we can see the deep ocean' (CSIRO 2022).This claim is particularly compelling when the camera's gaze is directed towards deep sea coral that, in contrast to popularly known and frequently visualized reefs like the Great Barrier, is largely unseen.A deep sea reef is, as Cameron McKean writes, 'a mountain that sinks beyond the reach of light and divers' (McKean 2021, 1), and this unknowability compounds the ways that coral is imagined and framed as a contemporary cultural icon.The slow and mostly consistent movement of deep sea camera apparatuses occasions a durational aesthetic, each transecting dive constituting an hours-long tracking shot, that helps create the impression that viewers are witnessing deep sea environments in an undisturbed way, coming to perceive deep sea coral as if it were pristine.However, the LED lights that enable us to see constitute a significant environmental disturbance, albeit not as significant as a bottom trawl scraping across the seafloor.While deep sea cameras render oceanic environments visible in new ways, they do so by affirming both scientific apparatus and human visual perception as perception par excellence, the paramount way of encountering and understanding the world.
Because they open up nonhuman environments, allowing viewers to see places and/or processes usually removed from human vision, and because their dives are livestreamed, deep sea cameras bear similarities to various digital technologies used to visually surveil animals on land and in the air that can be approached via cinematic frames of understanding.Working across geography and social anthropology, von Essen et al. detail multiple 'digital technologies for wildlife surveillance' (2021, 2) including thermal infra-red cameras and CCTV used to monitor wild boar (2021, 7); webcams used to surveil golden eagles, 'placed by conservationists in their nests' (2021,9); and livestreaming of Moose migration for Swedish TV (2021, 10).Conservation webcams are an example of what have elsewhere been termed naturecams, static cameras deposited in locations that enable humans to observe animals, ostensibly undisturbed, in captivity or in the wild.Naturecams are positioned by Belinda Smaill at a crossroads between 'non-fiction digital media' and 'documentary form' (Smaill 2016, 127-128).They are a recent technology and new media form that, indulging documentary's desire for the real 1 as they record nonhuman worlds, might conjure possibilities for new ways of perceiving nonhuman life, and consequently new understandings of agencies and entanglements between their subjects and viewers.Indeed, following this sense of potential, Smaill draws attention to multispecies ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose's 'ecological existentialism' (Rose and van Dooren 2016, 128-131).Rose describes ecological existentialism as a mode of kinship that, contra more conventional notions of existenatialism that highlight human loneliness (Rose 2011, 43), 'enjoins us to live within' uncertain dynamics of mastery and desire, which are heightened by the possibility of extinction, and to 'pour our love into this unstable and uncertain Earth' (Rose 2011, 43).In less emotive terms von Essen et al. posit that wildlife surveillance technologies augur 'new relations, roles, and practices . . .between publics and wildlife' that involve 'elements of control and care ' (2021, 11).Advancing camera technologies with increased visual veracity and mobility, the widespread availability of their images, and the abilities they allow viewers to perceive nonhuman life in situ may thus be understood to create conditions for something like empathetic connection across species and across remote locations around the world.
Crucial to this capacity is the camera's ability to create feelings of proximity or nearness.Imagery of the deep sea 'relayed' from unmanned apparatuses, argues William Firebrace, allows for 'increasing detail' yet place explorers/viewers at 'ever greater distance' (Firebrace 2011, 59).Contrariwise, Smaill elaborates that 'Describing the world enabled by this naturecam requires an acknowledgement of the unique relation between the spatio-temporal location of the observer and the scene observed,' going on to posit that they offers mastery via apparent proximity: naturecams 'promise the possibility of 'dropping' in to distant and exotic or hidden and intimate locations (Smaill 2016, 143).Similarly, for von Essen et al. surveillance technologies pertain to biopower (2021, 4), producing 'paradoxes of simultaneous intimacy and abstraction, proximity and distance, and decentralization and recentralization ' (2021, 12).Aspirations towards conservation and care must be balanced against impulses towards mastery, and interrogation of how systems of technology and capital intrude into animal worlds.With these tensions in mind, discussion of how the cinematic camera's unique ability to catalyse feelings of nearness to remote, inhospitable environments, especially marine environments and the life that inhabits them, will be returned to below.
Wildlife surveillance technologies and the relations they inaugurate are, for von Essen et al., the domain of the 'Digital Anthropocene,' an iteration of thinking on the proposed geological era of the Anthropocene -in which humans are understood to be significantly impacting Earth's climate and ecological systems -that 'emphasizes the digitization of human -environment relations' (McLean 2019, 160).However, there is perhaps a danger in overemphasizing the newness of such media.Smaill reminds us that a naturecam 'retains a strong reference to cinematic visuality ' (2016, 144), and thus inherits a lineage of cinematic form, criticism, and theory.Deep sea cameras, perhaps especially, must be understood in this manner.While they are made possible with recent technological advances, and the role cameras play in gathering scientific data in the deep sea may consequently have increased in recent years, they also belong to a long and sometimes high-profile history of audiovisual documentation of marine science expeditions that reaches back to early cinema and overlaps with popular genres.They can thus be framed as a recent iteration in a history of intersections between scientific deep sea exploration and cinematic endeavours, many of which exploit popular notions of the deep sea as profoundly unhuman: unknown and remote, even alien and hostile.
Nicole Starosielski charts the ways that 'cinema underwater,' films of various generic orientations both documentary and fiction, share 'production practices, technological innovations, distribution histories, and public reception' and constitute 'cultural knowledge about undersea environments (and their "natural" inhabitants)' (Starosielski 2012, 151).All of this cinema sets in motion relationships between viewers and their deep sea subjects.Starosielski's survey ranges from John Ernest Williamson's photosphere in the 1910s, an 'undersea observation chamber' housing a cameraperson 'connected to a boat via a long, flexible steel tube' (152); to 'ocean exploration films' in the 1950s such as those of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, or the more fantastic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1954), that 'exploited the exotic visual landscape of underwater environments to pioneer new cinematic technologies' (156); to later science fiction like Flipper (1964-67) that domesticate undersea spaces, making their 'otherworldly, extraterrestrial space with unlimited resources' into ripe territory for development and extraction (162-163); and even figurations of the deep sea as 'a site for extra-terrestrial life' as in The Abyss (1989) (163).Across the history mapped by these films, cultural perceptions of the deep sea overlap and intersect with British imperialism, US military expansion, and concommitant processes of racial othering and resource extraction (2012).Recent deep sea camera systems like those used by CSIRO and NIWA fit within these cultural matrices and their aspirations towards mastery.Perhaps compellingly, they especially resemble the oldest of these examples, being like Williamson's photosphere in several ways: connected to a ship by a sort of umbilical cable, and the result of a merging of technologies for both exploration and film (Crylen 2020, 144).
As an object of representation coral belongs to this history in a unique way, and instantiates it at our contemporary juncture where the possibility of extinction looms for nonhuman species.Historical practices for documenting and exhibiting coral, like recent wildlife surveillance technologies, partake in tensions between distance and proximity, but these tensions are seen to take on cultural and perhaps emotional significance.Marion Endt-Jones describes how the emergence of aquariums, as a device that 'separated visitors from corals, sea anemones and other aquatic fauna and flora by enclosing them behind glass walls,' constitute 'An unprecedented exercise in making the invisible visible and the remote accessible' (Endt-Jones 2020, 192-193).She notes that coral, however, has a unique capacity for 'dissolving boundaries,' thus proving fascinating and wondrous (Endt-Jones 2017) but also 'profoundly unsettling' (Endt-Jones 2020, 193).Ann Elias details how the attempts of Williamson and Frank Hurley -'image hunters' (Elias 2019, 6) -to document coral via photography fed various public fascinations with and fantasies about undersea environments: 'Coral reef environments opened the mind to the "floor of the sea" or the "bed of the ocean" in a positive way' (Elias 2019, 21).For Starosielski, 'The early history of undersea filmmaking continues to hold weight today' as earlier tropes have 'shaped subsequent views of the ocean' (163).Endt-Jones's historical appraisal meshes well with Schuster's contemporary identification of coral as being subject to an overwhelming 'plenitude of metaphorical associations ' (2019, 88).
Coral is perhaps less fascinating than many other oceanic species, not subject to transfiguration into terrorizing monstrosity in the way that a shark or octopus is, nor to easy anthropomorphization. Nevertheless, it prominently characterizes a type of life that remains ineluctably other.As Elias notes, it can only be properly represented via an underwater viewpoint (Elias 2019, 4) and is a key subject in the work of photographers and filmmakers marketed 'on claims of authenticity and realism ' (2019, 5).It is the subject of a desire for nearness, but it remains difficult to contain, both visually and figuratively.

Realism and proximity
Thinking about how the aesthetics and relational politics evinced by deep sea cameras might connect with the cinematic realism theorized by André Bazin offers a way to explore how some of the tensions sketched out here can be reconciled.In particular, such connections signal how the mediated encounters that contemporary deep sea cameras offer viewers might give rise to a particular sort of interspecies ethics that works towards care and operates across space and time.Drawing a connection between scientific instruments and Bazin's post-war writing on film may seem an odd rhetorical manoeuvre, but doing so brings into focus some ways that audiovisual media can hone viewers' awareness not just of the material and nonhuman world, but also of states of acute ontological and existential precartity such as the ecological existentialism posed by Rose.
The durational aesthetic of deep sea cameras lends itself readily to being understood as a sort of undersea slow cinema, which certainly pertains to a realist mode.A more profound starting point for this connection exists, however, in Bazin's own description of a mediated encounter with oceanic life in an essay titled 'Cinema and Exploration' (Bazin 1967) Here, Bazin reflects on the experience of viewing Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki (1950), a film integrant in the history outlined above that documents Norwegian explorer Heyerdahl's 1947 sailing expedition across the Pacific, undertaken on a raft.Bazin's description of Kon-Tiki is instructive in several ways.He describes Heyerdahl's film in terms that are remarkably applicable to the type of footage that deep sea cameras make possible, especially when livestreamed or unedited, claiming it 'manages to be the most beautiful of all films while not being a film at all . . .an unfinished creation ' (1967, 160).The film, to Bazin's sensibilities, is amateurish and non-commercial, including omissions and errors that professional filmmakers would not allow, and it thus presents as an incomplete cinematic fragment.Its 'fluid and trembling images' (Bazin 1967, 161) and its unknown formal qualities mark it as uniquely raw.It is not quite a film per se, yet for Bazin these things are precisely what make it beautiful and remarkable as cinema.
Kon-Tiki's remarkable qualities become apparent to Bazin especially when a brief encounter between the crew of the raft and a whale shark is depicted.In this sequence, the shark approaches the raft and can be glimpsed circling beneath the water, but the crew poke it with a spear and it disappears.The import of Bazin's reflections on Kon-Tiki, and particularly this sequence, is highlighted by Jennifer Fay in an article titled 'Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin's Posthumanism,' where she writes, 'The film's hand-held, "trembling" visual style and many gaps always remind us that there is a man behind this camera who is vulnerable to the events he records,' expanding to posit that the image of the shark becomes 'not an encounter with an endangered species but an endangering one,' a shot that 'captures not so much an image of an animal . . .as a volatile relation between the man and animal' (Fay 2008, 45).Fay's reading of Bazin draws attention to the way that the film impels in viewers a feeling of presence to the encounter, implicating a shared world across distance via the proxy of the sailor wielding the camera.Watching this amateurish, incomplete film, which aesthetically evinces the instability and dangers of the raft awash in the Pacific Ocean, and sensing its exposure to waves, wind, and the shark, viewers feel a degree closer to these contingencies themselves, and therefore more a part of the world, embedded in its flux.
Bazin's writing on Heyerdahl's film becomes particularly resonant for contemporary contexts of mass ecological catastrophe and ecological existentialism when its original historical context is taken into account.'Cinema and Exploration' is published in English in the first of Bazin's What Is Cinema volumes, and is constituent of his post-war efforts to theorize an ontology of the cinematic medium and its relationship to historical and material existence.He writes elsewhere in the same volume, in terms that now seem ecocritically attuned, that 'Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty' (Bazin 1967, 13) and Dudley Andrew, summarizing Bazin's thinking on cinema's ontology, surmises that cinema offers viewers 'life deferred indefinitely, reanimated at every projection' (Andrew 2014, 8).Kon-Tiki's whale shark's oceanic origins, it's otherness, and it's danger -it's out-there-in-the-world-ness -are integral to the way it is encountered, and those attributes are deferred from the crew's live, recorded encounter to the encounter experienced by Bazin, later, as a viewer.
Watching coral rubble via a deep sea camera, this dynamic is partially reversed.Viewers witness not a danger posed by a monstrous animal to vulnerable, isolated humans, but rather the dangerous consequences that human industry has wrought on coral, distant at the bottom of the ocean.The images serve not to pose the threat of annihilation, but to confirm it.Perhaps as viewers we are affected to see ourselves as complicit in that endangerment and annihilation, or perhaps not.But if the images of NIWA's Chatham Rise survey and CSIRO's Seamounts survey, though constituted and distributed via digital technology, are apprehended within a Bazanian framework, then they can be understood to compel a feeling of mutual exposure to contingency, ruin, and trauma.Considering coral's material vulnerability and its tendency to attract multiple cultural attachments, the contingency at hand is nothing less than the entire array of interlinked factors at play in the present endangerment of aquatic life: extraction such as trawl fishing, but also other forms of despoliation including acidification and pollution.Further, adding a layer of ontological complexity, the deferral at hand with a digital livestream constitutes an altogether different 'relay' than the deferral involved in Bazin's viewership of material analog film: the deferred life and affective capacity of the image is not mummified as such, but becomes multiplied, presented simultaneously on any number of screens around the world.
Bazin's reflection on Kon-Tiki shares in a responsiveness to mass catastrophe, having been written after the Second World War when his chief object of analysis and admiration is Italian neorealist cinema.At this time, much of his writing effusively praises films like Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946) andStromboli (1950) (which also includes documentary footage shot at sea -scenes depicting tuna fishing) and Vittorio Di Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), for their 'exceptionally documentary quality' (Bazin 1972, 20), their long takes and tracking shots, and their capacity to reflect and work through the trauma and devastation of the Holocaust and the European post-war experience.Bazin's fascination with neorealism has to do, in part, with coming to terms with humanity's exposure to devastation and death on a scale that was previously unimaginable, and his admiration is bound up in, among other things, the refusal of plot and reliance on depiction of everyday survival for drama.
Watching footage of the ocean floor captured by deep sea cameras, I am struck by qualities similar to those Bazin locates in both Kon-Tiki and neorealist cinema.I perceive each dive as constituent in metanarratives of human exploration and industry, and the catastrophic ecological degradation these aspirations are implicated in across the world, but my engagement via drama and visual spectacle relies on random documented encounters with animals and objects.The camera moves gently but not quite predictably to persistently make a record, both scientific and aesthetic, of a contingent world delineated by new kinds of mass death.When surveying the remains of deep sea coral, it lays this death bare before my eyes, bringing me into proximity with it, perhaps forcing something like an ethical recognition.

The care of the camera: ethics and mourning in mediated encounter
Across the environmental humanities, multispecies ethnography, and science and technology studies, many scholars advocate for processes of attention to and care for nonhuman life in the face of ecological crisis, articulating these processes and highlighting their ethical dimensions in different ways and via different theoretical cognates.These processes are frequently framed as arts.Many contributors to this discourse are brought together in the two-part volume Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Tsing and Swanson 2017).Anna Tsing writes at length in The Mushroom at the End of the World of the 'arts of noticing' (Tsing 2015, 17-26).Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster write of 'the cultivation of "arts of attentiveness": modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response' (van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016, 1); 'a practice "of getting to know another in their intimate particularity -steadily applying one's observant faculties and energies . . .a practice of learning how one might better respond to another, might work to cultivate worlds of mutual flourishing' (van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016, 17).Elsewhere, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren write of 'Ethos and the Arts of Witness' and 'the challenge of developing modes of response that hold on to a curious attentiveness to the lives and deaths of others in a world in which so much is slipping away' (Rose and van Dooren 2016, 126).This proliferation of work constitutes not only a vital transdisciplinary configuration but a broad ethical imperative.It asks, what does it mean to behold catastrophic environmental degradation?And more specifically, what does that compel in me?
In a world where, for many people, much knowledge about nonhuman life comes not from firsthand encounters but from media -blue chip documentaries, YouTube videos of animals, news footage of environmental catastrophes, etc. -understandings of different kinds of media need to be factored into our notions of what it means to notice, to bear witness, to be attentive to, and to imagine nonhuman life and death.This is especially true of life and death in the deep sea because, unlike encounters with mushrooms, dogs, birds, flying foxes, and other species that are the territory of the above theorists, humans can only encounter deep sea life through mediation.As Melody Jue writes: Rather than being immediately present to us, the (deep) ocean emerges as an object of knowledge only through chains of mediation and remote sensing -measurements that allow us to build up imaginative pictures of what life in the ocean is like . . .' (Jue 2020, 3) Theorizations of moving image media as cinematic art that has a particular affective power to move viewers therefore have an important role to play in appraising humannonhuman relations.
A notion of ethical care that emerges from this transdisciplinary configuration and helps work towards an understanding of what, in this context, that role might be, is offered by Astrid Schrader.Schrader theorizes 'abyssal intimacy,' beginning by describing a classroom quandary: teaching a seminar about environmental politics after the Chernobyl disaster, she assigns a reading about morphologically deformed radiated leaf bugs and discusses an artist who 'collects, studies, and paints' them (2015, 666).But her students, responding emotionally, just don't care about the bugs (2015, 667), prompting Schrader to unpack ways that people might be moved to care in an active way.Abyssal intimacy emerges from this triangulation of care as an ethical process that re-orients the self; scientific knowledge production; and an artist's creative, responsive work.It is a 'new sensibility' that shows human-nonhuman relations to be 'both intimate and wholly other,' invokes 'a new temporality of care,' and stipulates the reconfiguration of time (2015, 669): Abyssal intimacy then describes simultaneously a mode of engagement and a new kind of relationship between humans and other animals that is neither continuous nor discontinuous, but rather marks time out of joint; it retains a secret that unhinges the present.(2015,673) Because deep sea cameras operate at an intersection of scientific knowledge production and responsive, almost-realist cinema they are poised as a powerful tool for configuring this new and necessary type of relationship.As science, they enable precise observation of remote environments.But as cinema they defer, making fragments of space and time, reminding viewers that we are constituent in and vulnerable to a shared world that exceeds us.The mediation they offer grants us a form of access to a literally abyssal world that exceeds our perception while also reminding us that this access is contingent and incomplete.They enact cinema's capacity to affect us; to move us as part of the world.
Writing about another relatively new digital media that allows human viewers new perceptions of the world and shares in cinematic form and traditions, Katherine Groo connects drone imagery's weird, looping temporality with mourning for the planet.In the form of mediated mourning offered by drone cinema: . ..we do not memorialize the singular someone we knew well.We instead make partial, fragmented contact with vast and manifold formations that we may be encountering for the first time and will never know in their entirety.(2020,86) There is a peculiar temporality at work with deep sea camera documentation of coral, too, and it also gives way to mourning.In an attempt to elaborate it, I will further discuss my own engagements with deep sea cameras, and also with trawl fishing for orange roughy.Turnbull et al. observe how spectatorial experiences like my viewing of 'Visioning the Coral Sea,' during COVID-19 lockdown embedded 'digital human-animal relations into many people's daily rhythms with newfound intensity' (Turnbull, Searle, and Adams 2020, 6.7) and, perhaps due to my own viewing experiences intermeshing with pandemic-related anxieties, any wonderment they may have prompted was overridden by dread.Gazing at the ocean floor on my computer screen, I felt at once closer to and more distant from the world at large, and particularly to the imperilled worlds of coral, in a way that certainly no documentary film had conjured previously.Reflecting on On an Unknown Beach's ambivalent representation of solenosmilia's fate, the words 'coral rubble, coral rubble' rang in my mind, this time more clearly as a lament.
My own viewing of coral on the seafloor moves me, foremostly, to recognize the complexity and the irrevocability of my complicity with environmental despoliation and climate crisis.Fay concludes about Bazin's view of Kon-Tiki's whale shark, hopefully, that 'Through, and then after cinema, we can look at animals . . .afresh and begin to imagine the look they return.We may see ourselves, mirrored as it were, in an animal's gaze and find in the place of our reflection signs of intersubjectivity, a communication between the living' (Fay 2008, 61).But though my viewings of the deep sea affect me and move me towards care, they make it hard to share in this hope.This is because of the temporal dimensions at play: these mediated encounters were only one fragment of my contact with the ocean floor, but they made me newly cognizant of another, earlier contact I shared with solenosmilia.I was a child in the early 1990s and Friday night family fish and chip dinners are a favourite memory of this time.I remember waiting among other families in our local shop and looking at a poster on the wall that catalogued commercial fish species.Among them: orange roughy.
Coral rubble is given over to slime.It refutes ideas of assemblage, flourishing, vibrancy, and entanglement that are popular in the environmental humanities, belonging rather to what Killian Quigley terms the 'inaesthetic' or 'that which unforms' (Quigley 2022), auguring a future of gelatinous disfiguration.How, then, can I relate to it?Groo cites Roland Barthes, who writes of an image of his deceased mother: 'Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labour; straining towards the essence of her identity' (Barthes [1981(Barthes [ ] 2020, 79), 79).Looking persistently becomes a labour of mourning here, too, an effort to apprehend the life of a species, pushed to the brink, that cannot look back.The deep sea has long been a rich locus for human imagination, a space we have fantasized about via cinema and other media because we haven't known what it is like in reality.Nevertheless, because of industrial activity like bottom trawling, we have long been implicated in the future of deep sea life.Now, as new technologies for visioning and sensing are enabling us to encounter abyssal environments and species in new ways, perhaps we are simply revealing to ourselves how we have ruined them.