Near Gale: Forming a Future Organ*
Yvonne Volkart
translated by Kevin Kennedy
“A Monster approaches...”
Near gale. A storm is looming. Eerie sounds portend the unpredictable. Waves are clapping, a seascape unfolds. Each of Ursula Biemann’s three conceptual videos opens with a similar, strangely immobilized oceanic atmosphere. Opening us up to the unpredictable events coming towards us. Us, the viewers, inhabitants of the blue planet earth, whose surface is largely covered with water, water that expands, disperses, and determines us. “A monster approaches,” someone posted on Instagram, in anticipation of the arrival of Super Typhoon Hagibis. “Gaia intrudes,” writes Isabelle Stengers, defining a new ontological force, which, when provoked, mercilessly retaliates.[1] Gaia is ticklish, she says. Gaia is not passive “nature,” there to be exploited to the point of oblivion, as homo economicus imagined in his myriad phantasmagorias. No, Gaia is alive. She comes back. Like all of earth’s matter. Including water. Like the tides. Like everything else that changes. Glaciers melt, disappear, irrevocably, yet already they are filling streams, rivers, oceans, flooding coastal regions and—perhaps—restructuring property relations. Changes like these raise serious concerns for all of us—climate strikers, artists, rights of nature activists. Could they also turn us into allies with and through our differences? How to treat each other in times of waiting for the storm? What techniques and aesthetics of survival should be developed? How to achieve a common sense, a future sense, in a time without future? This is the ritornello performed by the videos Deep Weather (2013), Subatlantic (2015) and Acoustic Ocean (2018)—each a variation, a resumption, a continuation of the other. Each in its own way demands that the limitations of the technocratic mode of sensing be exploded in favor of a variety of techniques. Techniques of life, techniques of sensing.[2] Pleading that their respective transversal potential—particularly in the arts—is to be sought in experiences of co-existence with our fellow beings, and not in the perpetual deployment of innovative technologies. Sensing techniques are therefore not so much technologies but methods, or aesthetics of sensation.[3] They are undoubtedly “technical” sensing technologies conditioned by their material configurations and their possibilities afforded by such assemblies. But, beyond that limited view, techniques of sensing also afford “non-technical” methods for carefully forging relations with unfamiliar entities; sensing is tactile, physical, material, and thus, also indelibly involves building relationships. In this sense, each of Biemann’s three videos is an attempt to test a form of (self-) development that is not progress, but growth and becoming. A becoming-towards-something, where the something remains unknown and the becoming occurs among unknown entities, forces, or elements.
The fact that impersonal cutting-edge technologies scan both the ground and the body, rendering them as quantified, abstracted commodity forms, and that these technologies often fail to grasp the agency of the physical, and frequently collide with people’s techniques of living, are concerns that Biemann has already adeptly addressed in her first video essays, particularly in Remote Sensing (2003). But the speculative propositions in her latest conceptual videos go even further—namely, by demonstrating that the different techniques of sensing and measuring could converge; that something like a sensing organ, a future sense, a directional sensorium would have to be allowed to grow for a possible future; and that this sensorium, this direction, these techniques of sensing have to be explored in more-than-human cooperations.
Combining Collectives
In Deep Weather, the antagonism between images of technocratic progress and more rudimentary techniques of survival is staged by means of two opposing chapters and themes: concepts like oil and water, land and sea, technology and “nature,” profit and survival, north and south, exploiter and exploited are diametrically opposed—before they irredeemably dissolve. Lasting only a few seconds, the shot of a container ship (from Bangladesh, as will become apparent later) in the water is followed by an aerial photograph of open-pit mines; these images appear under the title “Carbon Geologies.” They are tar sands, mined along the Athabasca River in Alberta, Canada. Slowly, the destroyed, toxically murky landscape passes by. Far away and abstract, it seems eerily beautiful. Accompanying the humming, rhythmically recurring tone, a ghostly whisper explains what we are seeing. Then there is the sound of drums and the scenery shifts to the equator. “Hydro Geographies” is Part Two: a dam is being built by hundreds of people dragging rice bags filled with mud and dirt. The whispering voice continues: “Cyclones roar over Bangladesh in unpredictable intervals [....] The meteorological station sends signals and efforts are made to bring within a scientific order the sea and its storm systems.”
It becomes apparent that this type of flooding is not the nature of the delta. This flooding, to paraphrase Stengers, is Gaia intruding: tickled in the boreal forests of Canada, as in other places, where multinationals measure then tear open the earth’s crust with their machinery, in search of energy, Gaia replies in the delta. In the north, machines destroy depopulated Indigenous lands; meanwhile the south is swarming with people who have organized collectively: their technology lies in the form of their cooperation and in the persistence of their activity. “Collective social actions/to project villages on the outer rim of these amphibian territories/through self-organized humanitarian landscaping,” the voice whispers. The camera is now recording at eye level, on the ground, on the water; it takes in the bodies that are working, portraying their faces. Gone is the panoramic view afforded by the distanced position of the helicopter. The artist, too, seems to have adopted an amphibian lifestyle and is apparently regarded as a stranger. Then the video breaks off. No happy ending. Still, something has changed; the second part of the video transforms the menacing abstraction of the first into a situation of exposure and participation, which also affects the viewer aesthetically. Even though the basic technologies of collaboration used to combat the symptoms in the Bengal Delta seem insufficient in relation to the global scope of the climate crisis, one respects the indefatigability of these water inhabitants: they are people who, with some degree of success, have learned to survive next to the water, using only the sediments that are already there (and not sand, which has become scarce and would have to be imported in large quantities). They are people who, perhaps because they have no other choice, have not (yet) given up. Today, in times of complicity and paralysis, it is central to make this perseverance tangible. It may support us in what the ecofeminist Maria Mies already demanded decades ago in terms of complicity: she wrote that women are accomplices of capitalism, because they “naturally receive—and this is connected to the Third World—a share of the spoils [....] If we want to be serious, then we have to refuse this share of the spoils.” [4] Affecting us, the viewers, with the individuals of this collective and the simplicity of their techniques, Deep Weather encourages us to forge solidarity and forego privileges.
Between Dissolution and Solidification
This antagonism, aesthetically re-staged and thus structurally problematized in Deep Weather, is configured in Subatlantic as a mysterious basic tension, touching the limits of logical thought. Transversal forces like flowing and solidifying or upward and downward movements, which our system of thought perceives as polar, are experienced as dynamic, evolving ecologies. Filmed on the Shetland Islands, in Greenland, as well as off a nameless Caribbean island, the film brings together—as in Deep Weather—far-flung places from the northern and southern hemispheres, which are, in fact, climatically linked by ocean currents. The age of the “Subatlantic,” which is at stake here, covers a climatic period of 2,500 years at the end of the Holocene. This span is historical time, human time, but it also extends beyond the individual lifetime of mammals. A figure effortlessly traverses this span, leaving it open which species she belongs to. Is she a ghost? A phantasm? In fact, we never get to see her, we only hear her:
"She is in charge of measuring fluctuations and sending the data to the lab on the coast. She inventories the freezing and melting, minutely recording her encounters with difference. All seems to follow a dynamic order: The winds, the streams, the birds, the sky. The faintness of change made it hard to detect, but the rocks witnessed a steady rise of the Sea until one day all technical equipment had to be moved further inland. The coast sank into the Ocean for a thousand years. The lab now lies submerged at the bottom a hundred yards deep, together with other dwellings of the Islanders. To do her science, she had to become a diver, measuring a sinking contracting world. Only the Oceans are expanding."
The nameless figure is a female scientist, familiar with scientific techniques, but she has to go beyond them in order to grasp things in their complexity. She is not the only one engaged in measuring; in fact, the rocks and various aquatic organisms are doing the same thing, thereby considering the problem of climate change together: “There was questioning in the water.” No one knows where this is headed and what it means for those affected. Will it be cold or warm? Will the bacteria that have been trapped in the pack ice for 400,000 years, once thawed, change the water chemistry of the oceans? If so, what does this mean for life in, on, and under the sea? Because everything is alive and everything influences everything else, even thinking is conceived materially: “This intense cohabitation can only unhinge new thought sequences.” These transformations in our “geometric” thinking are aesthetically staged through changes in perspective: what once was the surface of the sea calmly changes into clouds a few sequences later, an assemblage of liquid and frozen elements. Then we suddenly find ourselves in water, everything around us is in motion, and we gaze upwards, like a marine creature, from the bottom of the sea. And even though the melting of the ice is portrayed as an ecological problem, it also appears, contrary to all ideological logic and entirely due to the conflictual aesthetic, as something positive—namely, in Marx’s sense that “all that is solid melts into air.”[5]
If I claimed above that Biemann develops a technique and an aesthetic of becoming, of becoming-together, then Subatlantic presents a form of non-linear development, which may be understood as ecological “concatenations,”[6] or as that which Isabelle Stengers designates with the term “event” [7]. Derived from the Latin evenire, it means to come out, to happen. The event is a happening, a becoming of things through the convergence of many, a gathering in concatenations of space and time.
Or, to put it differently, by following Bruno Latour’s reference to James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, developing in an enveloping: “For Lovelock, organisms, taken as the point of departure for a biochemical reaction, do not develop ‘in’ an environment; rather, each one bends the environment around itself, as it were, the better to develop. In that sense, every organism intentionally manipulates what surrounds it ‘in its own interest,’” where “interest” is understood in its etymological sense as what is situated “in between two entities.”[8] This means that organisms not only adapt to their niches, but also change and develop their environment according to their needs.
This development, which Subatlantic presents thematically, aesthetically and in terms of subject-related strategies, consists of becoming as an evolving event, of touching and being touched, a kind of intentional activation and transformation beyond human reason. In short, it is the multiplicity and unpredictability of that which is implied by growth when the latter is not based on the capitalist logic of progress.
Forming a Future Organ[9]
The scene opens onto a blue landscape, table mountains with white plateaus and lamellar-like slopes, swelling electronic sound, penetrated by strange, threatening notes. What appears uncanny and unknown is in fact a 3D model of a deep-sea trench off the coast of Lofoten, Norway; the sounds are those of communicating whales. The caption, rhythmically fading in, tells us that a sound channel was discovered in the North Atlantic in the mid-1940s. Due to its specific physical characteristics, the water in this SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) channel can transmit submarine sound waves over several thousand kilometers. During the Second World War, it was used as a “natural” medium for the transmission of SOS signals. During the Cold War, embedded hydrophones intercepted submarine communication and spy technology discovered unknown sounds. Later they were decoded as the low frequency waves of blue whale and fin whale communication—an acoustic ecology that had until then been considered mute. The next shot opens onto a rocky shore and a woman in an orange wetsuit. She unpacks a box of underwater sound recording equipment and sets it up. As she turns the knobs of the recording device, the sound we hear changes. The camera is close to the “aquanaut,” following her actions: her equipment not only makes the sound of marine organisms audible to humans, she also stages a sound event, like a DJane. Plugging into the channels, she creates underwater radio, sending the sound of the ocean into the ether: all creatures of the earth shall hear what is happening in the darkness of the sea! Fluorescent butterfly blennies swim towards us, coming very close, breathing, filling the picture. These are micro-organisms, whose disorders result from increased acidity in the sea: “Their absence will silence the submarine springs,” a caption reads. It is a reference to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which describes the effect of the pesticide DDT on organic life and recalls the canaries in the coal mines: the canary’s death signaled the presence of lethal gases in the pit, which thus had to be evacuated by humans as quickly as possible. Addressing disturbances to the tellurian ecosystem, the woman then recounts in a mythical song how the climate is changing for the Sámi people, and how this has led to the decline of the reindeer. The ancient, symbiotic relationship between humans and animals—the former are the guardians of the reindeer, who in turn are the guardians of the Sámi—is threatened. Off-screen, a Sámi song resounds as a terrestrial echo of the oceanic call into the ether. It is their way of getting in touch with the ocean creatures: “That night, a few whales showed up near the surface.” Maybe communication has been established, maybe not.
Several aspects of what has been discussed so far come together in Acoustic Ocean: in terms of the “plot,” a communication with more-than-human creatures is now being sought. To this end, the female scientist uses her sensing techniques and futuristic sensory organs to feel what is happening around her. She uses the mediums of nature—the SOFAR channel, the air, her voice and hands—in order to establish a different kind of communication. Technological means are also available, such as various recording and playback devices, computers, hydrophones, cables, and antenna. The boundaries between nature and culture, and nature and technology, begin to dissolve. Thus, the octopus-like hydrophones are not prosthetic techno-optimizations, but “outer organs enabling her to deeply immerse in the aquatic habitat.” The boundaries of her body have become indeterminate. The waterproof orange suit contains holes that allow for an exchange with outer space. Space is her techno-organic environment, “nature-culture,” the habitat of human and more-than-human beings, enveloping them just as it is enveloped by them. A reindeer skin wrapped around her neck testifies to the aquanaut’s proximity to the animals, a proximity not merely implying scientific analysis or cuddly interconnectedness, but also killing and eating. The ecology of co-existence must also include the procurement of food, which create food webs, characterized by the complex interactions between the species that transport energy and nutrients.[10] Her mythical chant tells of these tangled chains and their disruptions. The question of the functioning of food chains and the procurement of food is not only an ancient reference, but one also for the present and the future. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa shows, the peril of feeding several billion people has been used for decades to legitimize agro-industrial productivism and land colonization. And it is simply accepted, she writes, that precisely this kind of short-sighted productivism undermines food security, both now and in the future.
The trickster figures who appear in these two videos mediate between worlds, trying to establish a kind of knowledge that combines new and old techniques: there is the geophysical world of water, land, and air with its human and non-human inhabitants, such as molecules, bacteria, fish, vertebrates, and there are different forms of knowledge, embodied by techno-scientists, computers, data, witches, or Sámi reindeer herders. As an ambassador of her own multiplicity, the figure sets out to decolonize the techno-sciences and to initiate a cyborgian requiem of species.
Braving the Storm
Biemann’s development of a technique and an aesthetic of participation and participating in more-than-human life is part of a current turn that can be understood as a politics of care. This involves revaluing the creation of diverse affective relations, not replacing them with technical optimizations (such as a robotic nurses) for cost reasons, even though new types of care assemblages may well emerge. The notion that human and more-than-human beings can compassionately or caringly intervene in what is destroyed by industrialized economic activity no longer seems ridiculous. Queer feminist theorists, in particular, convey such values.[11] Thus Haraway conceives of sentient beings with antennas “who felt moved to migrate to ruined places and work with human and nonhuman partners to heal these places [...].”[12] Similarly, Natasha Myers writes: “This more-than-natural history [...] offers one approach to cultivating a robust mode of knowing grounded in queer, feminist, decolonial politics.”[13] Engaging with the multiplicity of a technique for sensing and an aesthetic of care reveals that there are different temporalities and spaces. We have arrived at a time when things can and must be thought together, as Sudesh Mishra and Krystian Woznicki contend:
"In Fiji, for instance, as early as the 1990s, academics from my university taught indigenous communities how to scientifically account for marine life and to lift or impose the tabu in accordance with data analysis. The results stunned all and sundry. Science, in short, sanctioned an indigenous conservation practice, which is now enjoying a revival throughout the Fijian archipelago. The marriage of the non-synchronous tabu with synchronous scientific knowledge might indeed inform the future-forging resurrection of an unfinished past. Science and technology should be deployed around extant indigenous practices that conceive of life in terms of an assemblage without regard to anthropocentric hierarchies and values."[14]
The most advanced approaches today learn from each other. They combine science, common-sense, and cosmological or spiritual thought, investigating and promoting the vitality and transformative power of organisms and matter. In the age of digital ubiquity, for many urban dwellers in the global North or South, the beeping of a sensor or the self-made blurry photo of a forest seem, if not more immediate, then at least closer and more familiar than filling mud into rice bags with their hands. Yet we live in these assemblages. This is where art to needs to disruptively intervene to break open the familiar. Biemann’s conceptual videos consistently celebrate and criticize these techno-mythical methods—allowing us to sense other, planetary connections.
* This essay was originally commissioned by the Blackwood Gallery of the University of Toronto Missisauga for the publication The Work of Wind: Sea, Christine Shaw and Etienne Turpin (eds.), Berlin, K. Verlag, 2022.
[1] Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism, London, Open Humanities Press/Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015, p. 43. Stenger’s notion of “Gaia” does not correspond to that of deep ecology.
[2] Birgit Schneider, Evi Zemanek, and Desiree Förster translated the concept of “Sensing Technologies” into German as Spürtechniken, which more or less means “Techniques of Sensing,” during the Spürtechniken. Von der Wahrnehmung der Natur zur Natur als Medium conference, University of Potsdam, 24–25 May 2018). This idea is further developed within the framework of my ongoing SNSF-research project, Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecodata, Academy of Art and Design, Basel (2017–2020).
[3] Regarding the notion of technology, see Jean-Luc Nancy: “Thus ‘technology’ itself is not only limited to the order of ‘technologies’ in the sense that one speaks of them today. Technology is a structuration of ends—it is a thought, a culture, or a civilization, however one wants to word it—of the indefinite construction of complexes of ends that are always more ramified, intertwined, and combined, but above all of ends that are characterized by the constant redevelopment of their own constructions.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Struction,” Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain (trans.), Parrhesia, no. 17, 2013, p. 2.
[4] Maria Mies and Barbara Speck, “Feministische Wissenschaftskritik: Ein Streitgespräch mit Maria Mies,” in Emanzipation: feministische Zeitschrift für kritische Frauen, vol. 15, 1989, online at http://doi.org/10.5169/seals-360910 and https://www.e-periodica.ch/cntmng?pid=ezp-001:1989:15::50.
[5] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” London, 1848, online at:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
[6] Gerald Raunig, A Thousand Machines, Aileen Derieg (trans.), Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2010.
[7] Stengers coined the term “GMO event” to designate the collective emergence of resistance against the implementation of genetically modified organisms in Europe in the early 2000s. See Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, op. cit., pp. 35-42.
[8] Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2017, p. 98.
[9] A first version of this section was published in Yvonne Volkart, “Techno-Ecofeminism. Nonhuman Sensations in Technoplanetary Layers,” in Cornelia Sollfrank (ed.), The Beautiful Warriors: Technofeminist Praxis in the 21st Century, New York, Minor Compositions, 2019, pp. 111-136.
[10] Maria Puig de la Bellacasa points out that the food web concept not only investigates who eats whom, but also how revaluations happen, for example, how the waste from one species becomes food for another. See Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care,” Social Studies of Science, núm. 45, 2015, p. 702.
[11] Theorists such as Donna Haraway, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Vinciane Despret, Lori Gruen, Natasha Myers, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, as well as others working in permaculture design, positively refer to these healing and caring aspects.
[12] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 137.
[13] Natasha Myers, “Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonizing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000-year-old NaturalCultural Happening,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3.3, 2017, 1, online at: catalystjournal.org.
[14] Sudesh Mishra and Krystian Woznicki, “Developing a Sense of Taking Part,” (11 July 2019), online at:
blogs.mediapart.fr/krystian-woznicki/blog/110719/developing-sense-taking-part
