Catastrophe in a Bottle: Ellie Ga’s Medial Detritus of Drift

Contemporary media artist Ellie Ga’s video-essayistic practice documents her maritime travels, interviews, and encounters with antiquated and, at times, lost artifacts of cultural production. But at certain dramatic turns within her narratives, she is forced to confront the dire realities of the humanitarian crisis emerging just off-screen. This paper considers these shifts in perspectives—from material studies of messages in bottles and the ruins of the Pharos Lighthouse to the bodies of asylum seekers—in order to propose a vein of media studies that superimposes populations under duress with the matter of their transnational, oceanic environments. While this study, following Ga’s, partakes in a media archaeological approach by delving into the operations of seemingly obsolescent processes of writing and recording, it draws upon theories of new materialism, namely Karen Barad’s writings on “intra-action” and “diffraction,” in order to reformulate difference within the assemblage of incommensurate ideas, bodies, theories, and matters. Ultimately, Ga’s videos and performances serve to inscribe within media studies and practice an ethics of exclusion which prioritizes uncertainty and intuition.