marine-media-metabolisms

ongoing PhD project in artistic research in the binational program at the
Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and the University of the Arts Bremen
since 2025

supervised by Prof. Mona Schieren
and Prof. Helen Pritchard











My envisioned artistic research project will address the environmental entanglement of the technological foundations of digital capitalism with marine ecosystems. Financialization practices of the deep ocean including maritime extraction of minerals from the deep sea to expand digital infrastructures, the polluting transfers of e-waste into aquatic environments and the bioleaching of e-waste by marine fungi are the vertices of this doctorate.

The project is situated at the intersection of critical media art and theory, artistic research, ocean humanities, queer-feminist science studies and the sociology of finance. Audiovisual artistic methods, geoscientific experiments and ethnographic fieldwork constitute the primary methods of the postdisciplinary and intraspecies research collaboration between a media artist/economic sociologist, geoscientists and marine fungi.

The practice-based research will address the question: What kind of material-discursive framework and knowledge practices can be devised to intervene in the (toxic) onto-epistemological metabolisms between digital materialities and oceanic ecosystems? The main objectives are to a) analyze the operational logics, epistemologies and instruments of deep ocean extraction in a discursive-material way as well as factors that distort them and b) to inquire into knowledge practices beyond extractivist reasoning by experimenting with these tools and cooperating with non-human creatures on this matter.

The envisioned research outcomes at this stage of the project are two to three mixed media installations that set up speculative artistic prediction models and allow to practice alternative forms of value creation in the face of the analysed extractivist financialization processes.

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