Ocean Memory: Thinking Through Seawater, Smell, and Multispecies Archives

概览

This episode is a lecture and Q&A with Melody Jue on “ocean memory,” a concept that asks whether the ocean can be understood as a site, medium, archive, and participant in memory. The central question begins with the Ocean Memory Project’s deceptively simple prompt: does the ocean have memory?

Jue develops the idea across science, literature, media theory, art, and philosophy. She distinguishes memory from history, explores ocean memory as archival, collective, anticipatory, and traumatic, and argues that ocean memory is shaped by seawater, microbes, ice, coral, abalone, smell, sound, acidification, and human cultural loss.

The talk’s main movement is from ocean memory as stored record toward ocean memory as embodied, distributed, and future-facing. It ends by emphasizing humility, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the need to imagine nonhuman sensory worlds if humans are to avoid harming ocean life.

分段落总结

[00:00] Opening Frame: Carrying the Past Forward

[事实] The talk opens by framing memory as not simply leaving the past behind, but carrying some sense of the past into the future. [事实] The introduction states that oceans cover almost 70% of the planet and that humans still know less about ocean depths than about the surface of Mars. [事实] Melody Jue is introduced as a scholar working across humanities, arts, sciences, scuba fieldwork, and coastal observation. [推测] The episode positions ocean science as a conceptual challenge to land-based assumptions in media, philosophy, and memory studies.

[01:24] Friday Harbor and the Question of Ocean Memory

[事实] Jue recalls traveling to Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories after meeting scientist Allison Santoro and being invited to a week-long gathering of scientists, artists, and one humanist. [事实] The gathering emerged from artist Daniel Cohn’s question: does the ocean have memory? [事实] Marine microbiologist Jody Deming reframed Arctic sea ice as a porous habitat where microbes can become microscopic memory agents. [推测] The origin story presents ocean memory as a collaborative research question rather than a single-discipline theory.

[03:11] Ice, Archives, and Nonlinear Time

[事实] Jue connects Deming’s sea-ice work to Jacques Cousteau-related iceberg imagery, Chasing Ice, and Jen Rose Smith’s critique of colonial bias in ice-core timelines. [事实] She explains that microbial memory can involve anticipation and recall, especially when organisms respond faster after prior exposure. [事实] She states that memory has a nonlinear temporality because it carries the past into the future. [推测] Ice is treated not only as a passive climate record, but as an inhabited and politically interpreted medium of memory.

[04:42] Memory Versus History

[事实] Jue asks how memory differs from history, drawing on Kerwin Lee Klein and Bhaskar Sarkar. [事实] She says memory can humanize history, foreground subjectivity, recover oral testimony, and challenge hegemonic accounts. [事实] She argues that asking whether the ocean has memory also requires asking why ocean memory matters now. [推测] The shift from history to memory opens the ocean to plural, contested, and politically charged accounts of the past.

[06:52] Taxonomies of Ocean Memory

[事实] Jue proposes several overlapping forms of ocean memory: archival memory, collective memory, anticipatory memory, and traumatic memory. [事实] Archival memory includes mud cores, coral growth rings, and seawater itself. [事实] She describes the Little Ice Age’s thermal signature as still present in deep Pacific waters. [推测] Ocean memory is presented as both evidence of the past and a material condition still shaping the present.

[08:12] Scale, Organisms, and Collective Memory

[事实] Jue asks whether memory should be sought in the whole ocean or in the organisms living in it. [事实] She uses Captain Nemo to raise the issue of whether marine organisms are of the ocean or simply in the ocean. [事实] Collective memory includes whale songs shared over time, microbial gene sharing, and quorum sensing. [事实] She notes that some microbes retain a gene useful before the Great Oxygenation Event roughly 2.4 billion years ago. [推测] The discussion challenges the boundary between ocean as environment and ocean as living community.

[10:08] Anticipatory and Ecological Memory

[事实] Jue discusses ecological memory through corals whose past exposure to heat or pH variability can shape future resilience. [事实] She treats immune systems as memory systems, using abalone exposed to pathogens as an example. [事实] In these examples, memory links past exposure, present condition, and future response. [推测] Memory becomes less like storage and more like preparedness.

[11:08] Milieu-Specific Analysis

[事实] Jue says ocean memory frames research differently from environmental memory because it asks what is specific to the ocean. [事实] Her book Wild Blue Media advances “milieu-specific analysis,” which asks how concepts change underwater. [事实] She argues that media studies and environmental memory scholarship often carry terrestrial bias. [推测] The talk uses seawater as a method for revising concepts that were built on land.

[12:38] Oceanic History and Traumatic Memory

[事实] Jue cites Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History,” Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, and the Middle Passage as examples of the ocean as social and historical space. [事实] She discusses the Ocean Memory Project’s Descent and Transformation, in which Bermuda free divers visit underwater wreckage of a slave ship. [事实] The wreck becomes a memorial to collective trauma while aquatic life has transformed the site. [推测] Traumatic ocean memory is not only about loss, but also about transformation, persistence, and underwater witnessing.

[13:41] Chemosensation, Smell, and Risk

[事实] Jue says her own ocean-memory questions keep drifting toward chemosensation, especially smell and taste underwater. [事实] A 2021-22 Ocean Memory conference on sense and sensing led to a smell walk podcast developed by a perfumer. [事实] Participants noticed cold, sea spray, and the newness of paying attention to smell. [事实] Jue connects smell with memory through Proust, Perfume, Chew, and with environmental risk through work on e-waste fumes in Guiyu. [推测] Smell becomes a way to think about both embodied memory and vulnerability to polluted environments.

[16:17] Awabi, Abalone, and Genetic Memory

[事实] Jue analyzes Mandy Suzanne Wong’s Duology, Awabi or Abalone, which connects Japanese ama divers, abalone, endangered cultural memory, and ocean health. [事实] The story imagines the ocean as a fragrant medium from the perspective of a planktonic abalone recognizing safe smells. [事实] Jue reads the abalone’s response as a relation among chemosensation, genetic memory, algae, rocks, and healthy ocean conditions. [事实] The story also uses ocean acidification to figure the breakdown of family and cultural transmission among ama divers. [推测] This example shows ocean memory as overlapping human and nonhuman memory rather than a single category.

[21:28] Invisible Kelp Forest and Smell-to-Sound

[事实] Jue worked with Anya Yermakova and Jacob Cram on Invisible Kelp Forest from Smell to Sound. [事实] The project uses fiction and sound installation to translate underwater olfaction. [事实] Eli Stein created sonic impressions of chemosensory experiences in a kelp forest. [推测] Turning smell into sound functions less as data visualization and more as a way to unsettle human sensory habits.

[23:44] Spiny Brittle Stars

[事实] Jue reads a section on spiny brittle stars, explaining that ocean smell need not require a nose. [事实] In an aquarium experiment, squid juice did not make brittle stars chase a source; they raised and moved their arms as if preparing to grasp food. [事实] She describes their smell response as whole-body, spatial, and source-agnostic. [推测] The brittle star example reframes olfaction as a choreography of contact with seawater.

[29:45] Ocean Microbes and Chemical Gradients

[事实] Jue reads a section on ocean microbes and dye dispersal in kelp forests. [事实] Dye disappeared quickly in surf zones but lingered in kelp forests, where slower water allowed chemical gradients to persist. [事实] She explains that microbes navigate without maps by chemotaxis, sensing concentrations and tumbling into new directions when gradients weaken. [事实] Jacob Cram compares microbes to dice because they are round and probabilistic in movement. [推测] The microbe example makes perception look like embodied calculation in a changing chemical field.

[36:38] Fragrant Time, Forgetting, and Acidification

[事实] Jue connects a Long Now story about aromatic gin made with bristlecone-pine juniper berries to the idea of an olfactory archive. [事实] She uses Sean Hsu’s “fragrant time” to ask how smellscapes distribute memory unevenly. [事实] She shifts the question from atmosphere to ocean and multispecies subjects. [事实] Ocean acidification is framed as both a shell-building threat and a chemosensory threat, including research on reduced sea bass smell in acidified seawater. [推测] Damaging ocean chemistry may also damage future forms of nonhuman memory.

[41:47] Q&A: Milieu-Specific Analysis

[事实] In the Q&A, Jue explains that milieu-specific analysis grew from reading Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. [事实] She asks how concepts differ underwater and how deep-sea pressure, temperature, and orientation shape thought. [事实] Examples include Susan Reid’s work on terrestrial bias in ocean law and Nadia Ahmed’s work on temporary waters and environmental policy. [推测] The method extends from literary and media theory into law, policy, and environmental governance.

[47:08] Scuba Diving and Underwater Orientation

[事实] Jue describes A Field Guide for Underwater Orientation as an argument for scuba diving as a humanities research technique. [事实] Diving gives access to first-person observation and enables interpretation within underwater circumstances. [事实] Her bookshelf reef example leads her to rethink shelves, gravity, buoyancy, and normative orientation underwater. [推测] Fieldwork is presented as a way for humanists to test concepts inside the medium they study.

[51:01] Interdisciplinary Collaboration

[事实] Jue says the Ocean Memory Project used immersive week-long workshops with flash talks, walks, shared meals, and longer conversations. [事实] She emphasizes that informal intervals built trust, which later made disagreement and argument more productive. [事实] She also notes that regular contact over time can foster cross-disciplinary dialogue. [推测] The collaboration model depends as much on social conditions as on formal research design.

[52:53] Do Oceans Dream?

[事实] An audience question asks whether oceans dream. [事实] Jue connects dreaming to psychoanalytic ocean imagery, anticipatory memory, speculation, processing, trauma, and repression. [事实] She says the key question is what kind of dreamer the ocean would be, since it need not resemble a human dreamer. [事实] She mentions Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris as fiction about a sentient ocean planet that observes scientists. [推测] The answer treats the question as a productive speculative prompt rather than a claim that real oceans literally dream.

[55:41] Geological History, Rocks, and Sediment

[事实] Asked whether ocean waters hold a scent or map of geological history, Jue resists a stable-map model because ocean conditions are constantly changing. [事实] She notes that seawater saturates the seafloor crust, rocks and sediment dissolve into ocean water, and some rocks come from marine life such as corals. [事实] She invokes Rachel Carson’s account of marine snow and seafloor sediment as a lyrical archive of Earth’s history. [推测] The boundary of “the ocean” expands downward into crust, sediment, and rocky forms.

[59:02] Corrupted Memory and Closing Disposition

[事实] A final audience question asks whether impaired ocean health could mean corrupted memory or ocean dementia. [事实] Jue says the dementia analogy shows how memory opens questions that “history” does not. [事实] In closing, she recommends first-person contact, curiosity, oceanic artworks, novels, poems, and humility as ways to become more attentive to ocean complexity. [事实] She recommends Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide for its attention to the Sundarbans, multispecies relations, storms, precarity, saturation, and entanglement. [推测] The conclusion asks listeners to become less anthropocentric by attending to how ocean beings sense and live.

播客点评/总结

[推测] This episode’s strongest value is its ability to make “ocean memory” feel intellectually precise without reducing it to one definition. Jue moves between microbes, sea ice, coral, literature, smell, law, trauma, and art while keeping the central question active.

[推测] The highlight is the sustained attention to chemosensation. By asking listeners to imagine smelling underwater, and even smelling with their ears, the talk makes nonhuman perception a serious philosophical and ethical problem rather than a decorative metaphor.

[推测] The main limitation is density. The episode assumes comfort with humanities theory, environmental media studies, and interdisciplinary vocabulary, so some listeners may need patience with the number of references and conceptual shifts.

[推测] It is especially suited for listeners interested in ocean humanities, environmental memory, media theory, art-science collaboration, multispecies studies, climate ethics, and speculative approaches to nonhuman worlds.