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Paper long abstract:

In my new "curatorial design" (Elhaik, Marcus 2010; 2020) I build on my early fieldwork on critical art and curatorial practices in Mexico City (2016), as well as on a recent book on contemporary aesthetics (2022).  In the latter, I had engaged the image work, ethical demands, and existential struggles of contemporary artists who find their inspiration in natural history and ocean sciences. In this new inquiry, I shift my attention to the audiovisual media practices of cetacean ethologists and communication scientists, as well as fishers’ video diaries of interactions with cetaceans. To these, I also juxtapose contemporary artists’ sonic and visual records of encounters with these decidedly intriguing marine mammals alas too often reduced to the moniker “charismatic”.  Concretely, I zoom in on three audiovisual media practices: the sound compositions of Ariel Guzik, an artist who designs and engineers instruments to communicate with whales and dolphins in the Sea of Cortez; the hydrophone recordings, spectrograms, drone footage, and photo-identifications by a team of cetacean ethologists and communication scientists who run a research vessel and a bioacoustics lab in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Rome; and the online platforms of fishers who produce video diaries of potentially fatal interactions with orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar.  These carefully selected media practices are the fragments of actuality and "micro-tonalities" that compose my book and radio documentary in progress, provisionally called The Strait and The Sea.