ABSTRACT
This chapter compares satellite images of the world’s oceans in digital screen culture with material artefacts drawn from the underwater world to question how global oceans are perceived from the perspective of the city. The focus is on two cultural reconfigurations of marine ecosystems in an urban museum, both of which evince the ocean’s fluid transitions of scale: from the mighty skeleton of a whale to the exoskeletons of microscopic marine zooplankton. These artefacts are also discussed in relation to the deep time of evolutionary history, and how profoundly this history is now challenged by anthropogenic erosion of global oceans and the attrition of marine diversity. The chapter proposes that an aesthetics of temporal rupture and spatial dislocation is a compellingly affective way of enabling urban culture in its regressively slow turn towards a more biotic, and less anthropocentric planetary imaginary.
