Interfacing the Ocean

The symposium Interfacing the Ocean: Designing from Below explores how the experience of being underwater can reshape practices of perceiving, knowing, and making. Beyond technological mediation, ‘interfacing’ is understood as a relational condition emerging through underwater immersion, multispecies encounters, and interaction with/in marine environments. 

The ocean’s specific milieu, so alien to human senses, reconfigures our being in an environment and destabilizes practical and theoretical assumptions developed in a terrestrial milieu. A shift of perspective towards seeing ‘from below’ offers leverage points to reframe design as a less imposing practice, aligning it with the environment in which it is embedded and on which it relies. Accentuating relationality over representation, Interfacing the Ocean strives to unlock epistemic and ontological potentials, both within and beyond contemporary ocean crises and their political, ecological, and societal implications.

This call invites researchers from multiple disciplines such as arts, design, anthropology, biology, acoustics, and environmental humanities to share concepts, ideas, and practices deriving from the experience of being in and with marine environments. Being underwater by the means of scuba diving, free diving, and snorkeling stands at the centre of this exchange, as an embodied practice of consciously attuning to more-than-human worlds.