In _Wild Blue Media_, Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies with (...) alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media _through_ the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor. (shrink)

Climate cuisine is about eating the future you want into being. In this article, I examine how seaweed recipes can be forms of climate fiction through the way that the reader is invited to participate in sustainable foodways. I examine several popularizations of seaweed aquaculture that imagine practices of eating and growing seaweeds. Their formal similarities center on participation: they include the direct address of the reader through the second person voice, and position themselves as instructional models. Bren Smith’s Eat (...) Like a Fish (Smith, Eat like a fish: My adventures as a fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer, Penguin, 2019) interpellates the reader as eater, invited to cultivate eating habits that, on a societal scale, would produce a more materially sustainable relation with the planet. The vignette “Ghost Bar,” which appears in Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Buck, After geoengineering: Climate tragedy, repair, and restoration, Verso, 2019), sensorily emplaces the reader in a future seaweed farm as a window into the kinds of livelihoods and forms of work that could be part of mitigating global warming. I trace the similarities between Smith's recipes and Buck’s interpellation of a reader, both of which use the second-person mode addressing an unmarked “you,” inviting this “you” to imagine and actualize the future dish or future scenario they sketch. While these texts have their own limitations at the level of the social imagination, such popularizations of seaweed aquaculture model an important way of understanding the intimacies of climate fiction and recipes. Recipes not only popularize the sustainable eating of seaweeds, but actively constitute a form of climate fiction through their intention to actualize more seaweedy futures. (shrink)