18.09

How ocean dreams

Sonic transmissions, deep-sea ecologies, and pluriversal listening
By Konstantinos Damianakis & Jol Thoms

Abstract

2.6 kilometres below the surface of the Northeast Pacific Ocean, Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space is submerged as a chimerical anomaly, a sonic platform entangled with an immense physics experiment and a vast oceanographic monitoring station. Attached to a subaquatic telescope that probes anarchic, abundant yet extremely elusive neutrino particles, the SFB1258’s Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) and Radio Amnion are in turn hosted at the »Cascadia Basin node« of Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) NEPTUNE Observatory. 300Kms west off the shores of Turtle Island (aka »North America«) this multi-year audio platform and communication device has commissioned and relayed more than 25 unique artists’ compositions deep within – and addressed to – Ocean. During each full moon since 2021, activating scales and senses »beyond-the-human« (Kohn), participants have taken part in telepresent, nonlocal, sono-luminous hydrosocial ceremonies initiated at the lunar-clock and portal https://radioamnion.net – Ocean is transcendental in that they are one of the prime conditions for the possibility of complex planetary life. Their dire and tumultuous conditions under industrial, extractive and monopoly capital include rapid die off, eutrophication, darkening, heating, and acidification. These in turn lead to cataclysmic events like an oversaturated Ocean that can no longer heat or carbon sink, as well as expectations for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Conveyor (AMOC) collapse (Ocean current collapse leading to unknowable climate and weather system disintegration). As a site for ecological grief and reprieve from hegemonic Western beliefs, Radio Amnion (RA) is an extension of an unprecedented opportunity to enter into a vast, distant and otherwise unreachable abyssal zone where physicists scry the depths for a rare neutrino’s superluminal cascade. In this audio-paper extracts from Amnion compositions alongside excerpts from Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece Solaris (1961) punctuate this development of the Quantum Ecologies project of Thoms’ PhD on »Landscape-Laboratories« (2021). Here we advocate for the re-enchantment and decolonization at sites of scientific knowledge production where »pluriversality« (Escobar) should be fundamental. By listening from a »cosmopolitical« (Stengers) perspective, this investigative array of vibratory thought explores how commissioned RA artists have approached Ocean through rites of sonic meditation, sonic fiction, and (watery) materiality.

Listening on your mobile device? Here's a direct link to Soundcloud

Radio Amnion acknowledges the support from Canada Council for the Arts, the SFB1258: Neutrinos and Dark Matter in Astro- and Particle Physics Group  and Ocean Networks Canada. 

Timenotes

1 [0:00 - 0:12]: This is an extract from Peter Godfrey Smith’s talk at Google, where he looks for the deep origins of consciousness through octopian subjectivities (2017).
 

2 [0:43 - 1:13]: For more details on the Radio Amnion apparatus as a site of indistinction between cosmologies of science and (nature-)culture, see Thom’s PhD thesis, »Quantum Ecologies« (2021). RA does not merely enter an otherwise »natural« space. It rather intervenes within a site »where planetary features … meet vast institutional and technological assemblages« in order to resist »Western science’s contributions to the disenchantment of the universe« (Jung, J. et al. 2022).

3 [4:58 – 5:07]: Lem (2016, p. 2)

4 [5:36 – 6:03]: Lem (2016, p. 4) 

5 [06:04 - 06:34]: It is widely known but also wildly under-reported that many things do indeed travel faster than light, or: superluminally. The infamous phrase, »Nothing travels faster than light«, is an excerpt of the more accurate sentence: »Nothing travels faster-than-light in the vacuum of space.« The crucial end of this sentence, often omitted, refers to a nearly unreachable zone desaturated of any absorptive matter, ie: with nothing to slow light down. However light travels slower in any medium or atmosphere (see also: phase velocity), and up to 30 percent slower in sea water. When a subatomic particle travels faster than light can in a medium the subatomic particle produces the radiative UV signature known as Cherenkov Radiation. An omniscient observational phenomena in the atmospheres of Earth, Cherenkov Radiation is a widely applied signal in particle physics, physical cosmology, and for nuclear facility monitoring.

6 [6:36 - 8:28]: Here, the listener is not expected to follow a coherent narrative, but invited to generate new sonic phantoms and fictions by listening to the patterns of narrative interference: diffractions between Caitlin Berrigan’s composition (2021) and Dwight Owen’s interview (in Thoms and Sierra 2022). Meanwhile, the two narratives are layered along with a recording of a mid-ocean ridge »black smoker« hydrothermal vent (Crone, T.J. et al. 2006). The stereophonic discordance of the voices also evokes ‘confluent listening’ as sonic argumentation (Damianakis, Jackson, & Rondel 2025), weaving together otherwise incommensurable scientific and fictional narratives. 

7 [8:40] For »spacetimematter«, see Barad (2006). 

8 [10:14 – 10:45]: Lem (2016, p. 152) 

9 [10:50 - 11:05] See Rabinowitz and Galloway (1984). 

10 [11:18] For »intimacy without proximity«, see Metcalf (2008). 

11 [12:20 – 13:05]: Lem (2016, p. 213-4) 

12 [13:12] For »Capitalocene«, see Haraway (2015) and Moore (2016).

Keywords

Ocean
Sound art
Science Fiction
ecology
Cosmopolitics

Bibliography

Barad, K. (2006). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128.

Boon, M. (2022). The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice. Duke University Press.

Bourne, A. (2020). »SOUNDING DIFFERENCE: LISTENING TO WATER TOUCH«. In J. Sanjo and J. Adjemian (eds) line bridge body: performance across the arts. Toronto, Canada, pp. 65–76. Available at: https://pdome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/line-bridge-body-no-1-Edited-by-Jano-Adjemian-Kingsmith-with-Bellerose-1.pdf.

Clarke, B. (2017). Rethinking Gaia: Stengers, Latour, Margulis. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(4), 3-26.

Damianakis, K. (2024). »Spiralling Out of a Shell: Fictioning More-Than-Machine Listening«. Organised Sound, 29(3), 262–274. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771824000244

Escobar, A. (2011). »Sustainability: Design for the pluriverse«. Development, 54(2), 137-140.

Eshun, K. (1998). More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Quartet Books.

Ferreira da Silva, D. (2016). »On Difference Without Separability«. In Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty). São Paulo, Brazil: Bienal São Paulo, pp. 57–65. Available at: https://issuu.com/bienal/docs/32bsp-catalogo-web-en.

Haraway, D. (2015). »Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin«. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159-165.

Jung, J. et al. (2022). »Doubling Down on Wicked Problems: Ocean ArtScience Collaborations for a Sustainable Future«. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9, p. 873990. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.873990.

Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lem, S. (2016). Solaris. Paperback edition. Translated by J. Kilmartin and S. Cox. London: Faber & Faber.

Liu, Z. (2022). What is Cherenkov Radiation? International Atomic Energy Association. IAEA Office of Public Information and Communication. Available at: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-is-cherenkov-radiation.

Marker, M. (2018). »There Is No Place of Nature; There Is Only the Nature of Place: Animate Landscapes as Methodology for Inquiry in the Coast Salish Territory«. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(6), pp. 453–464. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2018.1430391.

Metcalf, J. (2008). »Intimacy Without Proximity: Encountering Grizzlies as a Companion Species«. Environmental Philosophy, 5(2), pp. 99–128. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil20085212.

Meyer, M.A. (2020). »Holographic Epistemology: Native Common Sense«. In C. Smith (ed.) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 5232-5240. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_6.

Moore, J. W. (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Pm Press.

Neimanis, A. (2013). »Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water«. In H. Gunkel, C. Nigianni, and F. Söderbäck (eds) Undutiful daughters: new directions in feminist thought and practice. Transferred to digital printing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (Breaking feminist waves), pp. 85–100.

Oliveros, P. and Bourne, A. (2022). Sonic Meditations. Kingston, NY: PoPandMoM Publications.

Rabinowitz, S. and Galloway, K. (1984). »A Manifesto For The Original 1984  Electronic Cafe Network Project«. Electronic Cafe. Available at: https://www.ecafe.com/museum/about_festo/84manifesto.html.

Schulze, H. (2020). Sonic Fiction. New York: Bloomsbury Academic (The study of sound).

Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics (Vol. 1). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Thoms, J. (2021). Quantum Ecologies in Cosmological Infrastructures: A Critical Holographers Encounters with the Meta/Physics of Landscape-Laboratories. https://doi.org/10.34737/VWQ22

Webography

Rondel, L., Jackson, E. and Damianakis, K. (2025) »Listening for Mermaids: The Otherworldly Life of Lewisham’s Rivers«, Seismograf Peer, (33), Available at: https://doi.org/10.48233/61

Godfrey Smith, P. (2017). »The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness«. Talks at Google, 11 May. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iENXfnOobzw.



»Radio Amnion« (2025). Cascadia Basin, Pacific Ocean. Available at: https://radioamnion.net.

Strand, S. (no date). »Sophie Strand on Myths as Maps«. (For the Wild). Available at: https://forthewild.world/listen/sophie-strand-on-myths-as-maps-312.

Thoms, J. and Sierra, M. (2022). »Magical Fresh & Salty Conversation: Radio Amnion«. In TBA21 – Academy Radio. Available at: https://soundcloud.com/tba21-academy/magical-fresh-salty-conversation-radio-amnion.

Sonography

Crone, T.J. et al. (2006). »The Sound Generated by Mid-Ocean Ridge Black Smoker Hydrothermal Vents«, PLoS ONE. Edited by D. Palmer, 1(1), p. e133. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000133.

Hydrophone Recording of Cascadia Basin. Oceans 3.0 (2014). Ocean Networks Canada. https://data.oceannetworks.ca/SearchHydrophoneData.

Discography (in order of appearance)

Sibungu, L., & Katjavivi, P. (2021). Untitled pacific2.wav. Radio Amnion.

Berrigan, C. (2021). A Voice Becomes a Mirror Plane, Becomes a Holohedral Wand. Radio Amnion.

Diserens, P., & ocean comm/uni/ty. (2023). Upstream Ensemble. TBA21 Academy.

Bourne, A. (2023). Fathoming Lithium, sediment of pearl. Radio Amnion.

Mendes, M. (2021). Lateral Waters. Radio Amnion.

Boer, L. (2022). One the Edge, Clouds Passing By. Radio Amnion.

Zahedi, A. (2021). Ourano Amnion 2021. Radio Amnion.

18. September 2025
https://doi.org/10.48233/63
Sound and the More-Than-Human Worlds