How ocean dream: Sonic transmissions, deep-sea ecologies, and pluriversal listening by Seismograf

2.6 kilometres below the surface of the Northeast Pacific Ocean, Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space is submerged as a chimerical anomaly, a sonic platform entangled with an immense physics experiment and a vast oceanographic monitoring station. Attached to a subaquatic telescope that probes anarchic, abundant yet extremely elusive neutrino particles, the SFB1258’s Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) and Radio Amnion are in turn hosted at the »Cascadia Basin node« of Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) NEPTUNE Observatory. 300Kms west off the shores of Turtle Island (aka »North America«) this multi-year audio platform and communication device has commissioned and relayed more than 25 unique artists’ compositions deep within – and addressed to – Ocean. During each full moon since 2021, activating scales and senses ‘beyond-the-human’ (Kohn), participants have taken part in telepresent, nonlocal, sono-luminous hydrosocial ceremonies initiated at the lunar-clock and portal https://radioamnion.net – Ocean is transcendental in that they are one of the prime conditions for the possibility of complex planetary life. Their dire and tumultuous conditions under industrial, extractive and monopoly capital include rapid die off, eutrophication, darkening, heating, and acidification. These in turn lead to cataclysmic events like an oversaturated Ocean that can no longer heat or carbon sink, as well as expectations for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Conveyor (AMOC) collapse (Ocean current collapse leading to unknowable climate and weather system disintegration).

As a site for ecological grief and reprieve from hegemonic Western beliefs, Radio Amnion (RA) is an extension of an unprecedented opportunity to enter into a vast, distant and otherwise unreachable abyssal zone where physicists scry the depths for a rare neutrino’s superluminal cascade. In this audio-paper extracts from Amnion compositions alongside excerpts from Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece Solaris (1961) punctuate this development of the Quantum Ecologies project of Thoms’ PhD on »Landscape-Laboratories« (2021). Here we advocate for the re-enchantment and decolonization at sites of scientific knowledge production where »pluriversality« (Escobar) should be fundamental. By listening from a »cosmopolitical« (Stengers) perspective, this investigative array of vibratory thought explores how commissioned RA artists have approached Ocean through rites of sonic meditation, sonic fiction, and (watery) materiality. 

Radio Amnion acknowledges the support from Canada Council for the Arts, the SFB1258: Neutrinos and Dark Matter in Astro- and Particle Physics Group  and Ocean Networks Canada. 

Audio paper by Konstantinos Damianakis and Jol Thoms.

Part of Seismograf Peer: Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds