By Lisa Han. University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at the role that oceanic media have played in representing the seafloor as a space of potential profits. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production.
The book puts interventions from environmental media studies, digital media history, and the blue (ocean) humanities in conversation with fields such as marine biology, oceanography, ocean engineering, and nautical archaeology, tracing networks of meaning and translation across different realms of ocean observation and relation. Moving away from anthropocentric and colonial notions of frontier conquest and occupation, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities. From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?
Lisa Yin Han is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in the Claremont Colleges Intercollegiate Media Studies Field Group. She has previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Arizona State University and received her PhD in Film and Media Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Situated at the intersections of environmental media studies, critical ocean studies, and science and technology studies, Lisa’s work attends to social, environmental, and technological histories of media infrastructure. Her book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), examines how media operations in deep ocean environments pave the way for extractive industries. Lisa has also published work on environmental and digital media in journals such as Configurations, Media + Environment, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Contraception.
