There are many ways to tell the future.

Dark Oceanography integrates climate science with experimental music, modelling ocean currents (mesoscale eddies) in spatial audio and percussion. This work invites the audience to experience the vitality of ocean systems as they are imagined in a sunken future off the east coast of Australia. In doing so, Dark Oceanography contributes to an interdisciplinary and intercultural lineage of human speculation that looks to water to understand the passage of time.

The percussionists’ sound is transported away from its acoustic point of origin, mingling fluidly within the digital spin system that engulfs the audience. Bodies circulate and merge: “We experience ourselves less as isolated entities and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation” (Neimanis, 2017). The piece descends through the dataset in three stages from the ocean’s surface to nearly one kilometre underwater; the soundworld swells, an inverse energy cascade into the deep unknown.

The impact of anthropogenic climate change on the ocean’s current systems is unknown, and the risk to humans and non-humans alike incalculable. It is in the face of this precarious unknown that we feel most compelled to predict, forecast, prophesise—to somehow dredge sediment from a murky future that necessarily flows beyond our reach. Dark Oceanography, as a confluence of arts-science methods for thinking about the future, is also necessarily an exercise in scaffolding the unknown.

Section titles are derived from Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology.