The Strait and the Sea Unsettling Scores

In this inquiry I build on my previous work on contemporary aesthetics to engage the media practices and bio-acoustic mappings of cetacean scientists, as well as fishers’ video diaries and sound cartographies of interactions with cetaceans. To these, I also juxtapose a contemporary composer, sound engineer, and media artist’s sonographic records of encounters with these decidedly intriguing marine mammals alas too often reduced to the moniker “charismatic”.  Concretely, I zoom in on three media practices: the sound compositions of Ariel Guzik, founder of the Nature Expression and Resonance Lab, who designs and engineers instruments to communicate with grey whales, sperm whales, and bottle nose dolphins in the Sea of Cortez; the hydrophone recordings, spectrograms, drone footage, and photo-identifications by a team of cetacean ethologists and communication scientists who run a research vessel and a marine ecology lab in the Tyrrhenian Sea; and the multimedia online platforms of fishers who produce video diaries of potentially fatal interactions with orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar.  These carefully selected and juxtaposed audiovisual practices are the graphic, acoustic, and musical fragments that compose the de-territorialized cartography I am calling The Strait and The Sea.