Oceanographic Art + Science: Navigating the Pacific begins with the premise that the ocean sciences are distinctively visual and graphic, and that the Pacific region holds a wealth of resources for investigating the historical and present visual and instrumentation practices that have constituted the work of ocean scientists and the aggregation of ocean science, art and design, conquest and resistance navigated over and around the sea. It is proposed at a moment in which the ocean is characterized as the new frontier of scientific research. On a changing planet, with 71% of its surface covered by one connected ocean, the art and science of oceanography has greater relevance than ever before. As the lure of planetary space recedes, we collectively look to the sea and find there a dire climatic future made visible through the work of oceanographers, photographers, and cartographers. But the oceans are also a source of hope, mitigation, and sustenance. Minerals and microbes so small and so deep they have not yet been seen are imagined as resources in the mission to level the curve of anthropic decline. Oceanography is visual and graphic, but the ocean is refractory, resisting light and looking. We draw together a range of practices to complicate the question of what constitutes scientific knowledge and how best to navigate the hydrosocial domain that is the sea.

Navigating the Pacific takes this paradox as an opportunity in a project that brings together a network of 35 researchers (artists, scholars, and scientists) working in teams of three to collaboratively study the visual and sensory techniques used in oceanographic and indigenous science to see, sound, image, and imagine the oceans. Led by media art and science historian Lisa Cartwright (Visual Arts, UC San Diego) and cognitive scientist and curator Nan Renner (Birch Aquarium, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego), the group explores how art and science share common ground in manifold practices of representation, making human and natural phenomena perceivable to our senses. The project begins with the premise that oceanography, like photography and cartography, foregrounds visual and sensory ways of knowing and navigating the world and thus offers a strong platform from which to consider the art-science nexus in its rich history and vibrant future. The project proceeds by mining the archives of oceanography, and by engaging with current scientific research through UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the largest, oldest, and most significant centers for ocean and Earth science research, and a longtime hub for art-science collaboration. The Scripps Archives, held in the Geisel Library Special Collections, holds visual artifacts and objects documenting subjugated ocean histories and art histories as well as documents from some of the most important oceanographers in the field’s history. This resource is virtually untapped for a project such as this.

The Oceanographic Art and Science project researchers will, in the first instance, produce Graphic Ocean: Navigating Pacific Art and Science, a book and catalog crossing art and art history, ocean sciences history, the visual sciences, photography and media history, and climate and environmentalism. Each of its eleven chapters will be produced by a team composed of an artist, a scholar, and a scientist, and will take the form of either a text-image essay or a contiguous essay and artist work produced for the book and engaging forms such as book art, science illustration, visual science techniques, curatorial archive mining, lab and field documentation, and process-based art documentation. To be fully outlined in the exhibitions phase are joint exhibitions: Archival work, existing works, and artworks produced through the 2020-22 research collaboration will comprise the body of works to be shown in 2024 exhibitions at the Birch Aquarium and the Geisel Library.