Zones are imagined lines in myriad, complex, teeming ocean environments whose intricate relationships and processes remember billions of years of ongoing transformation.

Zones do not come from nowhere.

In the early seventeenth century a debate about how oceans should be conceptualised and governed bubbled up over the North Sea. In Mare Liberum/The Free Seas (1606), Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius argued that the oceans should be free to use by all nations and could not be divided up into bordered territories. A decade and a half later, English lawyer John Selden responded in Mare Clausum/The Closed Seas (1635), arguing that the sea could and should be divided up into territory like land. These arguments were not abstract but took place amid massive changes across global oceans. The Dutch and British were building maritime imperial power through domination and violence, and the arguments in Mare Liberum would allow the Dutch to challenge Spain and Portugal’s claims for exclusive rights to maritime trade with the non-Catholic world and thereby increase their own imperial power.[1] Meanwhile, Mare Clausum’s arguments for maritime sovereignty supported English and Scottish fishing interests in their rivalry with the Dutch, at a time of ‘accelerated marine extraction’ that was a precursor to modern industrial fishing.[2]

Ideas of the free and closed seas would long outlast their specific historical, geographical, and political contexts. Following a century-long debate, the ‘freedom of the seas’ became a key principle of ocean governance. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which came into effect in 1992 after a similarly long debate, retained this principle while also introducing new zoning provisions in response to the increasing territorialisation of ocean waters. Most notably, UNCLOS introduced exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which extend 200 nautical miles from a nation’s coastline and grant ‘sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, of the waters superjacent to the seabed and of the seabed and its subsoil’.[3] In O’Brien’s pay zone, articles from UNCLOS are pinned up on clipboards and layered with seismological charts from oil prospecting off the Irish coast. These layers of material – curling at the edges, tied together with ratchet straps, twisting into plumes – suggest the precarious interface between protection and exploitation where oceans are managed as natural (and national) resources.

In this sense, midnight zone destabilises the zone of its title. Discussing ongoing forms of colonial and capitalist extraction in South America, Macarena Gómez-Barris describes the ‘extractive zone’ as ‘the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our… vision to reduce life to systems.’[4] Artistic practices, Gómez-Barris suggests, can expose and counter colonial and capitalist visual logics – such as zoning – that render lands and waters as sites of extractable resources. Art can attune to ‘submerged perspectives’ on environmental relation and violence, as other ways of sensing renewed and emerging forms of territorialisation, extraction, and climate injustice.

net

Knots catch particles, trawl, bubble, foldfray. Looking through it, listening, slow resound: the instrumentalised deep sea. Net-hauled horizontally through the water, watched from the gallery inland from the River Boyne, where in Irish mythology the Salmon of Knowledge/An Bradán Feasa was caught by the poet and sage Finn Eces and accidentally eaten by Fionn mac Cumhaill. Oceanic knowledges and fishing practices are connected in multiple ways in Irish history, and the first Irish marine research vessel was commissioned by the newly established Inspectors of Irish Fisheries in 1819. However, centuries of British colonialism and extractivism also shaped and limited Irish marine science, knowledge practices and economies.[5]

In the gridded chair, you or the viewers you are sharing the space with are tilted slightly backwards, reoriented by the angles of the net. Behind or underneath the noise of the waters, the slow air ‘Port na bPúcaí’ echoes, sweeping and almost ghostly below the snaps and pops of fibres through water, bubbling. Some say the tune remembers the sounds of humpback whales heard through the hulls of fishing boats out on the Atlantic. Some whales dive down to horizontal layers of the ocean called SOFAR channels, where shifts in ocean temperature and pressure allow low frequency sound to travel hundreds of miles without losing energy. To sound can mean to emit an acoustic vibration, but also to measure the depth of a body of water. SOFAR channels are used by the military too, to detect submarines. In slow resound the net becomes another channel of sound, pulsating through transducers, a trawled space where fish and other marine creatures get caught up in noise and light, removed from their habitats and lifeways. Research shows that the intensification of anthropogenic noise in the ocean, from fishing, shipping, and other industrial activity to military sonar and seismic surveys carried out by mining companies, has harmful impacts on marine mammals.[6] How do you listen, image, (re)sound without capture?

In Daggertooth, a cropped shot of a huge net (trailing, reeling, many-looped and dripping) appears alongside intricate processes on board a marine research vessel: scientists measuring the tiny bodies of fish against a ruler, water inside containers swaying with the ocean waters unseen outside the boat, wires and plastic condensation and hand-labelling, pop songs on the radio while scientists sort between creatures, remove organs, bag up. Transparent marine crustaceans pick their way over the fish, able to move for longer out of water. Discussing contemporary scientific practices in and outside of the deep ocean, feminist environmental humanities scholar Stacy Alaimo imagines a ‘violet-black ecology’: ‘Rather than scrutinize deep sea creatures as they writhe and squirm in suffocating air and glaring light, a violet-black ecology would descend, in highly mediated ways, to zones of darkness to witness diverse animals in their own watery worlds’.[7] As accounts of immersion suggests in its tracing of deep-water submersibles off the West coast of Ireland in the 1970s, these are embodied worlds of labour and risk, precarious breathing apparatuses and precise attentions. However, O’Brien’s work stays, sometimes uncomfortably, with the glare, the gelatinous refractions and conflicted collaborations of the ways we come to know and relate to deep ocean life.

code

‘Provide a description of ambient noise and light, and the influence of existing Exploration and maritime activity’, reads the International Seabed Authority’s Draft Regulations on Exploitation of Mineral Resources in the Area – ISBA/25/C/WP.1, also known as the Mining Code.[8] Silent, O’Brien’s draft fissure appears as a set of portals in the ground, looping footage of deep-sea mining research and exploration practices that often remain out of sight. Yellow plumes of sediment curl upwards from tubes, mechanical arms rise slowly and twist, pulling up crumbling chunks that resemble burnt car parts. A fish flickers – their dorsal fin rippling – between scraped edges of crust.

Deep-sea mining involves the extraction of minerals from the ocean floor, including polymetallic nodules (potato-like lumps that take millions of years to form, as depicted in O’Brien’s studies for minerals), polymetallic sulphides (found in hydrothermal vents) and cobalt-rich crusts (which form on rock surfaces), with the stated intention to use these minerals for renewable technologies. The ISA’s exploitation regulations remain in draft because of ongoing concerns about deep-sea mining’s environmental impacts, and scientists, environmentalists, Indigenous peoples, and multiple nation-states (including Ireland) have called for a precautionary pause while the extent of these impacts remain unknown. Even before the exploitation regulations comes out of draft, the prototypes involved in prospecting and exploration also have environmental implications for slow-forming geologic and ecological communities. As draft fissure traces, obfuscation is part of deep-sea mining’s logics and material operations. When mining instruments remove material from the seabed, they release plumes of water and sediment into the midnight zone, disturbing habits, increasing turbidity, blurring what can be seen. These material obfuscations, as Susan Reid writes, are ‘compounded by poorly developed regulatory frameworks and insufficient knowledge of ecologies, material temporalities, and their interactions’, acting to preserve ‘capitalism’s resource ecology’ over and above ‘living ecologies’.[9]

midnight zone considers how the material, political, and cognitive obfuscations of extractive industries and neoliberal international agreements co-occur with the increased mapping, monitoring, and datafication of the deep ocean. Just as a lack of knowledge can be mobilised to facilitate the expansion of environmentally damaging activities through the Mining Code, so too are oceanic knowledges increasingly codified in terms of digital data produced using expensive remote sensing technologies and techno-scientific expertise. Working between these codes and their contradictory logics, midnight zone’s aesthetics of the deep ocean contend with the politics of emerging technologies of visualisation.

cloud

Zoned by light and temperature and pressure and salinity, oceans are layered. In midnight zone layering becomes an aesthetic strategy, calling attention to the ways that sensing the ocean is technologically and materially mediated. As Melody Jue writes, ‘in order to study the ocean – especially the deep ocean – scientists need a variety of instrumentation, satellites, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), submersibles, sonar and other technical prostheses for sampling and sensing’, and therefore ‘the ocean emerges as an object of knowledge only through chains of mediation’.[10]

Imagine a coast from underneath, fractals of never-quite-edges inscribed by the time it takes lasers to bounce back a cloud of data points. of antique (sun-shy) sea rematerialises remote sensed LiDAR data by printing them on copper, an earth-toned recompression of a virtual 3D scan. Lossy, time sticks to the grain. submerged point cloud’s lines are sharper, layering in light, translucent slips of zoning, gloss and emanation from the top of a table with no ocean underneath. What visions undergird these imaging processes? The ways you approach, look at and through the layers of midnight zone might be as important as what they reveal or obscure; like the floor-portals of draft fissure and the chair-tilt of slow resound, submerged point cloud asks for a shift in orientation, a different depth or horizontality of looking through the gallery space with eyes not meant to be submerged, the materials the space and its bodies gather and their relation to multiple temporal scales of oceanic geological formation, biotic and abiotic community, and visual mediations of persistently unknowable elements of deep oceanic life. In midnight zone the dense point clouds of advanced imaging technology are layered with clouds of sediment disturbed by deep-sea mining prototypes and clouds of digital data infrastructures for computing the ocean and clouds of net trawled and drifting in the epipelagic zone where light seeps more than liquid. Rather than assuming an alternative vision of oceanic relations that could transcend the fraught techno-logics and material practices of sensing them, midnight zone lingers unflinchingly in the strange proximities between the plume and the glare.

[1] Alison Rieser, ‘Clupea Liberum: Hugo Grotius, Free Seas, and the Political Biology of Herring’, in Blue Legalities: The Life and Law of the Sea, ed. by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), pp. 201–218 (p. 209).

[2] Poul Holm, John Nicolls, Patrick W. Hayes, Josh Irvin, and Bernard Allaire, ‘Accelerated Extractions of North Atlantic Cod and Herring, 1520-1790’, in Fish and Fisheries, 23.1 (2022), 54–72.

[3] United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Part V, Article 55, p. 43, https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf.

[4] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. xix.

[5] John B. Roney, ‘Introduction’, in Coastal Environments in the West of Ireland: Sea, Land, and Spirit, ed. by John B. Roney and Mark Beekey (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023), p. 3; Michael Paye, ‘Beyond a Capitalist Atlantic: Fish, Fuel, and the Collapse of Cheap Nature in Ireland, Newfoundland, and Nigeria’, Irish University Review, 49.1 (2019), 117–34.

[6] Eoghan Daly and Martin White, ‘Bottom trawling noise: Are fishing vessels polluting to deeper acoustic habitats?’, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 162 (2021).

[7] Stacy Alaimo, ‘Violet-Black’, in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 233–51 (p. 234).

[8] International Seabed Authority, ‘Draft regulations on exploitation of mineral resources in the Area’, 2019, p. 81, https://www.isa.org.jm/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/isba_25_c_wp1-e_0.pdf.

[9] Susan Reid, ‘Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones’, in Blue Legalities, pp. 25–44 (p. 29).

[10] Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 3.