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. 

I have moved frequently since childhood, but I have always lived near the sea—on the edge of one continent or another, where the ocean constantly reminds one with its salinity, moisture, and the rhythmic whoosh of its tides. This thesis, too, dwells at the boundary between the terrestrial and the aquatic.

This research examines how the ocean has been reconfigured into multiple forms of land, focusing on the technologies and institutions 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, layering it with complex juridical, political, and territorial formations. The project identifies critical possibilities within this history, ultimately compiling a body of writings that aspires 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 from my research are compiled and structured as narrative strata, akin to the geological layers deposited by oceanic forces. These strata are not organized by chapters following historiographical linearity, a structure that has traditionally dominated thalassic storytelling, nor by the chronological release of archives. Rather, 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 an episodic lineage of media and its aquatic infiltration.