Spheres of the Aquatocene: Homo Aquaticus Resurfacing Submerged Histories
Spheres of the Aquatocene: Homo Aquaticus Resurfacing Submerged Histories

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores how J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World is reimagined through intermedial ecocriticism and McKenzie Wark’s concept of low theory in the context of the Toronto Biennial of Art’s Cinesphere. Curated by Charles Stankievech, the exhibition brought together 24 artists whose works reinterpreted Ballard’s speculative vision through film, digital simulation, sonic composition, and archival media. Works such as Stankievech’s Cargo Coral (Espiritu Santo), Lisa Rave’s Europium, Drexciya’s Bubble Metropolis (1993), Cyprien Gaillard’s Ocean II Ocean, and Brandon Poole’s Carla’s Island investigate climate crisis, colonial residue, and techno-scientific mediation. By analyzing how these intermedial works engage audiences through layered media forms, this paper argues that such practices are not simply aesthetic but also tactical. They destabilize hegemonic narratives of progress and environmental catastrophe, functioning as “low theory” interventions that foreground submerged histories, critique techno-scientific rationalities, and propose speculative futures. Drawing from Afrofuturism, media archaeology, and the sensory politics of sound and space, these artworks reveal the climate crisis as both material and mediated. Intermedial strategies—archival remix, sonic myth-making, and cinematic temporal collapse—serve as tools to subvert dominant epistemologies and reconfigure the relationships between ecology, history, and media. These adaptations do not merely visualize ecological transformation; they embody and spatialize it, engaging audiences in affective, multisensory ways. As artificial islands and aquatic architectures become speculative spaces for negotiating climate anxiety and terrestrial precarity, intermedial art emerges as a critical method of reworlding. Ultimately, this paper contends that media are not only vehicles of representation but also historical agents. Through the lens of Ballard’s drowned landscapes, these artists articulate new relations between past and future, memory and matter—where intermediality becomes a necessary practice for navigating ecological uncertainty and reshaping planetary imaginaries.

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