The Ocean Is Not a Machine: A Feminist Media Analysis of Oceanographic Models, Simulations, and Futures

This article examines how scientific and artistic representations and technologies shape ocean futures. Dominant Western oceanography frequently engages mechanistic metaphors that conceptualize the ocean as a machine, pump, or carbon sponge. This way of visualizing the ocean, guided by the logics of control and quantification, shapes contemporary remote sensing, modeling, and prediction technologies. Alternative approaches to oceanographic representation, including Indigenous, anticolonial, Black feminist, and artistic approaches, offer critical counterweights to destabilize the authority granted to mechanistic oceanographic representations. Ocean simulations and scale models are infrastructures through which ocean futures are rendered and presented in multidimensional space. Through a comparative media analysis of a scientific ocean simulation tank with an immersive artistic ocean installation, I demonstrate how simulation technologies function discursively, rendering specific ocean futures credible while foreclosing others. While the scientific simulation embodies confidence in ocean datafication, surveillance, and the spectacle of dominant U.S. scientific power, the artistic multisensory exhibition explores the limits of oceanographic transparency, as well as feminist, anticolonial, and nonhuman epistemologies to imagine ocean relations beyond extraction. I draw upon STS arguments that models, simulations, and technical images of the ocean are inherently political world-making practices, not neutral mediators. I propose that future studies must cultivate a critical media literacy of scientific representations to avoid reinscribing colonial, extractive, and militarized orientations toward the ocean and support situated, relational, and non-dominant ocean futures.