Truthing Gap - imagining a relational geography of the uninhabitable

This paper refers to art works made whilst Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton exploring methods of undersea survey. The deep seabed constitutes the largest, least known, or accessible, environment on the planet – an ‘extra geographic’ space whose histories are geological rather than social. Hostile to either direct encounter or optical survey, the sub maritime can be said to exist at one remove from both the drive of the post enlightenment to render the world as observable phenomena and the representational economies to which this gives rise. At the same time rapidly accelerating economic, political and ecological pressures mean it can be described as a truly emergent landscape. This paper will consider: 1. The extra visual character of the sub-maritime 2. The necessarily ‘insulated’ nature of deep-sea investigation and the ‘disembodied’ character of the analysis to which this gives rise. 3. The implications for knowledge production, objectivity and the scientific gaze, of ‘envisaging’ environments remotely, which cannot be directly experienced. 4. Examples of artworks generated in response to these questions. * The term Truthing Gap refers in Oceanographic studies to the need to verify remotely gathered data with other kinds of information.