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The Numberless Waves of the Sea

Sat, September 7, 9:45 to 11:15am, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Bayside B

Abstract

When Leonardo da Vinci, around the turn of the 16th century, wrote of “the numberless waves of the sea,” he articulated a reverent sense of the ocean as an immeasurable expanse, a bounded surface that might contain the infinite. Western mariners and scientists in the wake of the Enlightenment would seek to bring this realm into the domain of the accountable, even unto its waves. This paper will argue that just as longitude and oceanic wind tracks became thinkable through the techniques of their time (clocks, railroads), so did ocean waves become readable using conceptual schemes made available by twentieth-century technologies and media — from amphibious landing craft to cameras to cinema to electronic communications devices to non-linear calculus to digital and virtual modeling. Apprehending waves through and as objects of transmission, inscription, and interface — that is, as media — scientists construed them as processes in space whose futures in time might be foretold, predicted. This paper brings together conversations from elemental media theory, the post- and de-colonial blue humanities, and oceanic STS to explore how waves were brought into the realm of the named and numbered.

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