Ocean as Metaphor and Embodiment

Abstract

In a climate of increasing political instability and social transformation, scholarly discourses have started to foreground the fluidity of form as essential for human and inter‐species co‐existence. There is a pervasiveness in contemporary society of what Zygmunt Bauman, in his analysis of “liquid,” software‐based modernity, refers to as form immersed in and affected by conditions of uncertainty, insecurity, and unsafety. Many anthropologists and sociologists have argued that the efficacy of such a form is grounded in its state of emergence, that is, in the ways it both exceeds and is continuous with its constitutive parts. Artists expressing this contingent fluidity often draw our attention to the ocean as a site of emergence and creation. Today, much of this artistic reimagining of ocean life is executed digitally and dramatised by liquefying solid objects that morph into other, less familiar shapes. New environments are being generated, particularly by means of AI, that are freed from the burdens of the present. The association with the ocean’s currents frames the liquefaction of unmoored, drifting, and blurred entities as an opportunity for change and a metaphor for the world to come. Discussing the work of media artists such as Refik Anadol, this article situates the agency of artistic production within a broader shift towards the conditions of liquid modernity and suggests ways to confront aesthetically pleasing sensations with art that recognises the inequitable impacts of societal transformation. It argues for an ocean that is both metaphorical and embodied, liquid, and more than wet.