Slought is pleased to announce Sea of Images, a program of short films that investigates the visual geopolitics of oceans, on Thursday, September 14th from 6:30-8pm. The program features works by artists and researchers including Forensic Oceanography, Emilija Škarnulytė, Ayesha Hameed, Filipa César and Louis Henderson that consider the connections between visual technologies of maritime surveillance, borders and migration, historical memory and witnessing. Organized in conjunction with the Concordia-Penn Graduate Student Conference "Counterpublics," this program will launch Slought's new Mediatheque space. Organizer Gwynne Fulton will introduce the films, and the screening will be followed by a public discussion.

The sea has been variously theorized as a blank space outside of time and history and a "terra nullius," or a commons that facilitates movement, but belongs to no one. Roland Barthes once described the ocean as a semiological void that "bears no message." This program brings together experimental media practices that critically intervene in these interpretations by reframing the spatial order of the sea as a historical construct produced and mediated by imaging technologies.

The works presented in this program explore connections between optical apparatuses of surveillance, history and memory, violence and visibility, suggesting a series of overlapping questions: What is the forensic status of images? How have technologies of surveillance—from modern navigation and cartography through networked satellites and aperture radio—produced the sea, rather than merely representing it? How have they been deployed by mobile practices of maritime governance to police offshore borders? And how can they be repurposed to bear witness to the ocean's subaltern stories? This program considers the sea as a material witness to an archive of diasporic memory that spans from the Black Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Defying traditional forms of temporality and historiography, these works develop new strategies of visual engagement from opacity and fugitivity to abstraction and op-art that help us interpret what Forensic Oceanography has called "liquid traces" of these counterpublic histories. Deploying image practice as an archeological and forensic method, they articulate a submarine resistance to the dominant visual order of sovereignty at sea.