Submerging Kittler

Abstract

This article imaginatively submerges the media theory of German scholar Friedrich Kittler into the ocean in order to show how the ocean changes how one might theorize computational media. Beginning with a description of XL Catlin Seaview Survey’s oceanic ‘Street View’, it plunges into several examples from Kittler’s own work that engage sound and the sea. I argue that natural media are always already co-present with digital media; and we have only recently and retrospectively been able to see natural media as media through the lens of analogous technical media for storage, transmission, and recording. The ocean leads to a more comprehensive account of the networked power of computational media and their contemporaneity with natural media. Attention to the role of environment in this way suggests a mischievous inversion of Kittler’s claim that ‘media determine our situation’. Perhaps the possibilities of our media are determined by the materiality of distinct environmental situations.