Waters Irresolved: An Archaeology of Aquatic Media

Columbia University, Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture

Waters Irresolved examines a spatial history of technologies implicated in forms of maritime territoriality. 

This research focuses on the technological and instituitional assemblages that have produced, arbitrated, and governed maritime spaces. By excavating both well-known and hidden stories from the history of science and technology, this thesis reveals how various technical objects and systems have transformed the sea, stacking up within it complex juridical, political, and territorial formations. The project identifies critical possibilities within this history, ultimately compiling into a body of writings that aspire to contribute to an archaeology of aquatic media.

The format of this thesis, however, performs its own antithesis—the irresolution of the ocean’s terrestrial becoming. Vignettes of technological narratives are collected and structured as discursive strata. Not organized by chapters following historiographical linearity, a structure that has traditionally dominated thalassic storytelling, nor by the chronological releasing of archives, through their unchronological and loosely transitioned arrangement, these strata together illuminate how the material, indigenous, and ecological specificities of the ocean have been abstracted, alienated, and rendered amenable to terrestrial, institutional capture. This sedimentation of research does not cohere into stable, majestic plateaus; instead, it forms islands, swamps, and wetlands—spaces situated at the liminality between land and sea. These littoral writings gesture toward a possibly lineage of media and its aquatic infiltration.