About the Aqueous Earth Catalog by Ennuri Jo

What is it?

Aqueous Earth Catalog is an interactive geospatial visualization tool. Named after the U.S. magazine Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972), whose mission was to inventory tools, methodologies and technologies, and otherwise useful resources in a comprehensive, global scale, the Aqueous Earth Catalog will encourage students and researchers to shift their understanding of the cultures as static and land bound to fluid, dynamic, and interconnected.

In its current form, the Catalog is a media mapper, consisting of a freely browsable map with pins that mark the coordinates of bodies of water around the world that are significantly referenced to or featured in films and video texts, and pages that explain each film text in more detail. The user will be able to browse the map freely to view pins that each refer to a media text from the database. Content pages for individual films and media texts include basic information like title, director, year; in addition, they note shooting location(s) and their supposed narrative space.

The Aqueous Earth Catalog is supported by Media Mapper, a mapping project funded by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. The Media Mapper is designed by me, a postdoctoral fellow at CARGC, and created by Ben Tyler (Lost Creek Designs LLC).

What are the media texts in the Catalog?

The Aqueous Earth Catalogue specifically draws from a database that collates media texts from my book project as well as works from two books highly relevant to studying the intersection of filmic media and water in the blue humanities: An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (Erika Balsom, 2018) and The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy (Margaret Cohen, 2022). The Catalog openly solicits additions to the database from users: submissions will be added to the map upon review.

The map attempts to express in clear and intuitive form the global and local embeddedness of the bodies of water that are narrativized in the films. As much as cinema’s watery images offer an embodied engagement with the imaged world, they are part of filmmaking practices and infrastructural histories that allow the films to exist. The map highlights directions for further research into the relationship between the textual, the environmental, and therefore the ecological and the political. Eventually, the Catalog will feature in addition to this mapping tool a series of multimedia articles that incorporate the map view by contributing scholars in fields across environmental humanities.

What is the difference between the Media Mapper and the AQEC?

Media Mapper is the mapping tool wireframe that the AQEC lives in. As an open-source application, the code of the Media Mapper will be available for anyone to use with their own database. More information forthcoming.

Why Aqueous?

The title “Aqueous Earth Catalog” takes its queue from Whole Earth Catalog, the U.S. magazine published between 1968 and 1972 by writer and environmental activist Stewart Brand, now often referred to as the inspiration or an ancestral form of the internet.1 The eclectic mix of featured items in WHC aptly reflects its interest in the idea of the wholly comprehensible planet, alongside its countercultural ethos of the democratization of access to knowledge and self-education. The WHC indexes entries including but not limited to: satellite images of the Earth, aerial shots of cities, photographs of the human anatomy, studies of human psychology, geometric design blueprints inspired by animal and plant forms. The curatorial spirit that emanates from these pages is a genuine curiosity about the planet we live in and share with other beings; it is this spirit that led Brand to question in the first place, “why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” The WHC reflects his desire to see everything there is to see about this planet, and while this doesn’t come without the often-harmful perspective that the planet constitutes a fully comprehensible object, its desire to learn about and catalog all the nooks and crannies of this planet also feels like a careful and loving attentiveness. The Aqueous Earth Catalog takes cues from this curatorial love. The easily browsable map attempts to offer a global (in a sense as literal as possible) scope with which to consider representations of the planet’s water bodies. The database includes film and video texts produced from around the world, offering information on both texts and production sites outside of the US and Europe: whereas the texts will reflect a conscious attempt to highlight works coming out of the Global South, the production sites when involved in location shooting practices of European and American studios may offer directions for research in filmmaking and media’s relationship to globalization and extractive infrastructures, among others.

In as much as the pins show bodies of water specifically featured in or providing the settings for specific texts, they should also help visualize how the water bodies are linked with one another directly through geographical features and the hydrologic cycle on one hand, and on the other the various artificial and anthropogenic movements of human and nonhuman lives, objects, cultures, and even ecosystems, including those involved in the making of the films or narrative devices featured in the films. The map and the database are an attempt to index what is ultimately impossible to neatly categorize: bodies of water escape neat political boundaries that mark the commonly seen map of the world; the complex network of waterways taunt easy labeling devices and man-given names. Here, Franz Krause and Veronica Strang’s call to “think relationships through water” is instructive (2016). They write: “Rather than treating water as an object of social and cultural production – something produced through social relationships and imbued with meaning through cultural schemes – we consider water as a generative and agentive co-constituent of relationships and meanings in society.”2

The Aqueous Earth Catalog approaches water neither solely as a resource nor an imagination but as an agent of textual, cultural, and political imagination with geophysical, socioeconomic, and ecological impact on both the human and the more-than-human world. It encourages shifting our attention from terra firma to the waters; from the environment as a formal setting to an active agent in a human-nonhuman ecology. In turn, then, what the bodies of water in the Catalog might visualize is not just a map of media texts, but also another way to think of media’s role in how we think of relation at large.

What is your book project and what does it have to do with this map?

The Aqueous Earth Catalog acts as a complementary project to my research. My book-in-progress, tentatively titled Aqueous Image, examines moving image texts that feature bodies of water that all concern, in a number of different discursive contexts, a disanthropocentric and nonexploitative mode of being-in-the-world. Bodies of water are however, as generative as they are as figurations, not imaginary. They are complex ecosystems that play critical roles in the larger natural and artificial environments. The Aqueous Earth Catalog is an attempt to address the material embeddedness of bodies of water and their filmic representations and serves as a complimentary object to this written study.3

Notes

  1. The Whole Earth publications are accessible for free at wholeearth.info. Steve Jobs is widely quoted to have said that the Whole Earth Catalogwas the “internet before the internet.” Additionally, Homay King’s introduction of the Whole Earth Catalog includes a description that its directory “was in some ways a precursor to the crowd-sourced reviews and linking practices found some forty years later on the Internet.” Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Duke UP, 2015), 4.
  2. Franz Krause and Veronica Strang, “Thinking Relationships Through Water,” Society & Natural Resources 29, no.6 (2016): 633.
  3. In my work, I use the term “aqueous” not only to refer to the specific presence of water in filmic texts, but also to address its work in destabilizing essentialized conceptions of identity and the phenomenological experience of embodied spectatorship it solicits.