editor’s introduction
by Megan Horn
In order to view Hito Steyerl’s video installation Liquidity, Inc. (2014), viewers lounge on judo mats placed on a platform that resembles a cresting wave. However, the architectural elements surrounding the video are markedly placid in comparison to the film’s jarring montage of weather forecasts, mixed-martial arts fighting, and social media references, that float and dissolve before digitally animated water. Special effects also make the video itself appear as though it were rippling. Steyerl’s layering of pop cultural references against the water’s surface is more than an analogy comparing liquid currents to flows of information in the digital world. The satirical weather reports and footage of destructive hurricanes shown on television and phone screens with cluttered web browser windows and tumblr pins of spoofs on Hokusai’s Great Wave also make water a subject of the digital flows as much as it can be used metaphorically to describe the digital. By juxtaposing disparate pop cultural, economic, geopolitical, and meteorological terms, Steyerl’s Liquidity, Inc. emphasizes interconnectedness of fluid systems driving weather patterns and the currents of geopolitical struggles and financial crises in globalized capitalist systems.
Hito Steyerl’s work emphasizes the shared root between the words currency and currents. However, as recent scholarship in the blue humanities would argue, this relation is more than a metaphor; the ocean and other watery systems are in fact entangled with human conflict, commerce, and culture.1 The blue humanities is an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic studies that considers not only the ways in which oceans impact both human creativity and imagination, but also the interactions between human and non-human entities and environmental concerns. For instance, Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg even use the concept of the ocean, and all that it intermingles with, as a “Hypersea” to describe how the ocean exceeds its liquid form, perpetual cycles, or a specific body of water by permeating and shaping physical matter, such as the atmosphere and our bodies, but especially our imaginations.2
Peters and Steinberg’s work provokes a reconsideration of the relationship between elements in Liquidity, Inc. as more than disparate units circulating in the digital world. In previous writing, Steyerl has described the “poor image,” or the low-resolution, reshared, and memed images and videos that circulate on the internet, as dematerialized but deeply connected to everyday reality because of their instantaneous and constant circulation.3 In this artwork, the liquidity of assets or navigating the changing economic, digital, and geopolitical terrains is far from immaterial. Although Steyerl approaches the aquatic as alienated and heavily mediated in Liquidity, Inc., another perspective on her work foregrounds the ways that the aquatic shapes our imagination of the digital world and provides a vocabulary for its streams of data, fluidity, and amorphousness. Concurrently, the capitalistic and industrial systems that Steyerl’s video references can be understood as having real, material impacts in their contribution to the acceleration of climate change.
In this vein, this issue of SEQUITUR presents scholarship that applies the interdisciplinary approaches of the blue humanities to works of art spanning the early modern era to the present. “Currents” here refers not only to the aquatic, but to the perpetual motion and circulation of non-human materials, ideas, and people. The authors in this issue frame the ocean in the work of artists, architects, and collectors as not merely a backdrop but also as a site of imperial conquest, extractivism, and profit; as a site of migration, speculative inquiry, and rife with potential resistance.
In this issue, Carolyn Hauk discusses the idea of submersion in Renee Royale’s photographic series Landscapes of Matter, in which the artist exposes the Polaroid prints to water collected from the Mississippi River. By submerging, and thereby subjecting, the Polaroid to the inorganic chemical detritus accumulated from petrol extraction and agricultural runoff in Louisiana’s wetlands, the altered photographs challenge conventional notions of the archive and the role of sight in the production of knowledge. Hauk’s essay underscores how Royale’s abstracted photographs destabilize the role of sight in the formation of knowledge as the images both archive ongoing ecological violence as well as subvert the use of photography in the documentation and speculation of land by white, settler-colonial economies.
Both man-made and natural forces also feature in Melody Hsu’s close analysis of the oyster-celadon bowl, once prized by the Qianlong Emperor (1735-1796), again unsettling an anthropocentric art history. This Ru ware bowl, fused by the ocean with a once-living oyster shell, embodies qualities of the marvelous appreciated within Chinese philosophical and aesthetic traditions and exemplifies how chance and oceanic forces shape this man-made object’s meaning. Here, the composite object exemplifies not only the aesthetic potential, but also the imaginative potential between tidal and cultural forces.
However, as Fatema Tasmia’s essay shows, beyond producing aesthetic and philosophical value, oceanic currents can be harnessed to capitalize on and commodify even the most transient states of water. Tasmia’s essay considers the architecture and material culture of the Indo-American ice trade and how the infrastructure and habits that centered on this fragile and melting luxury became both preservatives for cosmopolitan food and drink and the comfort of white bodies, as well as indicators of colonial modernity in India’s warm climate.
In the context of nineteenth-century America, Sybil F. Joslyn’s research spotlight proposes the concept of Salvage Culture, a framework concerned with material recovery, value, and reward, and how it might be applied beyond shipwrecks to the work of scrimshanders and the collecting of ship figureheads. In doing so, Joslyn proposes readings of scrimshaw not only in their context at sea, but as a means through which whaling crewmembers might have found creative value in the repurposing of whale byproducts. Similarly, the collecting of figureheads might be reevaluated aesthetically and culturally through this framework as sculptures evocative of an American golden age of commerce.
Nathaniel Craig reviews Stacy Alaimo’s recent The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life (2025) as a contribution to the blue humanities and with particular attention to Alaimo’s idea of “mediated intimacy.” Craig acknowledges that the affective potential of aesthetic experiences of the deep sea that Alaimo argues for may in fact increase ethical concerns for the life threatened by climate change and underwater drilling. At the same time, this review raises the issue that, while the aesthetic encounters might prompt imagination, speculation can also serve to imagine and transform material into profit. Craig’s review ponders how the visual might be leveraged in service of our oceanic world and what systems (neoliberal, colonial, etc.) need to be attended to in order to do so responsibly.
Considering curatorial practice, Jessica Braum reviews the exhibition Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time (July 19-October 13, 2025) at the Clark Art Institute and its ambitious consideration of the sculptor’s engagement with time, cross-cultural experience, and material interdisciplinarity. Braum’s review points to the exhibition’s strengths in bringing together works by Noguchi which most clearly resist a linear sense of time yet also bring together the past, present, future in their geological and human-shaped materiality and their evocation of perpetual motion. This review also provides a critical lens into the ways in which adhering to a tight curatorial theme might constrain the possibilities of reading the works as unbounded temporally, materially, and culturally.
Together, these contributions offer a rich exploration of how artistic activity and material culture make visible, help detect, and even resist the invisible forces at work in our world.
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Megan Horn is a third-year PhD student. She studies twentieth-century American photography and material culture. Her research focuses on the interrelationships between documentary photography and the negotiated conceptions of national identity. Megan has previously held positions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Newport Art Museum.
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1. John R. Gillis, “The Blue Humanities,” Humanities 34, no. 3 (June 2013), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities.
2. Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, “The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology,” Dialogues in Human Geography, 9, no. 3 (2019): 293-307.
3. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal 10 (November 2009): 9. http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_94.pdf.