Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens

Abstract

Since the year 2000, artists have increasingly employed tools, methods, and aesthetics associated with scientific practice to produce forms of art that assert themselves as kinds of experimental and empirical knowledge production parallel to and in critical dialogue with science. Anthropologists, intrigued by the work of art in the age of its technoscientific affiliation, have taken notice. This article discusses bio art, eco art, and surveillance art that have gathered, or might yet reward, anthropological attention, particularly as it might operate as an allied form of cultural critique. We focus on art that takes oceans as its concern, tuning to anthropological interests in translocal connection, climate change, and the politics of the extraterritorial. We end with a call for decolonizing art–science and for an anti-colonial aesthetics of oceanic worlds.