Dolphin Mania is a film about dolphin swim tours in a small community outside Melbourne, Australia. This is one of the few places that these tours are allowed. The filmmakers interrogate the effects of the tours for both the people and the dolphins who swim with them. The film brings up questions such as: is this really eco-friendly tourism? How can these operators balance people’s desire to make contact with marine animals (and worlds) without “turning it into a theme park?” What will the model for nature tourism be in the future?
NOAA’s National Ocean Service helps organize and carry out ocean explorations within the US’s thirteen marine sanctuaries and once ecological reserve. On their website they document (with photos, video, and text) many of these expeditions in detail. There is a significant educational component to the site: there is a section on the history of NOAA exploration, technologies of ocean exploration, a gallery of different types of media, and a variety of different materials crafted specifically for teachers, such as lesson plans. As the site states:
The NOAA Ocean Exploration program strives to engage broad audiences to enhance America’s environmental literacy through the excitement of ocean discovery. Increasing this literacy requires high-quality, effective collaborations between ocean explorers and America’s teachers. NOAA is forming such collaborations to reach out in new ways to the public to improve the literacy of learners with respect to ocean issues.
The vast amount of media on this site is meant to tie together scientific research with public environmental literacy (and potentially, activism). And the media itself is what makes the site a place for the “excitement of ocean discovery.” Users, or students, are encouraged to explore, dive into these explorations, each of which has a variety of media to sift through. The interface of the website itself, with a variety of different links (and evocative images) encourages this exploration as well.
Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience, a book by Susan G. Davis, looks at the social construction of nature in Sea World of San Diego. She examines how ocean life in the park has been shaped by its corporate sponsors, its local context in San Diego, its ties to environmental education, and though not directly, media forms such as television and film. She writes:
“Television was central to the construction of the attraction and the city. For Sea World, it directly helped create exoticism and visibility. The park’s developers learned well from watching Disneyland: they connected the park to the dominant national medium by making its landscape resemble that of popular network programs like Adventures in Paradise. And from the beginning, they filmed TV shows in the park.”
Sea World is not only constructed in a way that draws from (and engages with) popular television (a spectacular but family friendly show, centered on ocean celebrities), but also serves as a set for future television and film. This was integral to getting the national audience necessary to keep Sea World afloat.
Even today, new media technologies, such as immersive worlds and large screen video, have continued to influence and become integrated with the park, assisting in the creation of ocean space as another (exotic) world.
The Aquabank (established in 2007?) is an underwater video sharing website. Users upload their underwater videos and have access to over 20,000 underwater videos already on the site. There are adult underwater videos, celebrity videos, commercials, and a variety of other types of underwater media. Everyday there is a new stream of underwater video on AquabankTV.
Continuing my underwater commercial kick, here’s one from Clorox. A young mermaid swims in a mystical underwater environment and follows a message in a bottle up to the surface. The mermaid turns out to be a little girl taking a bath. A mother, getting ready for a night out, turns to look at her daughter. A voice says: “Because a bathroom can be more than just a bathroom. Clorox helps keep it clean, even the imaginary parts.”
This commercial (yet again) depicts the underwater space as a clean, pristine space (which establishes the conditions of possibility for imaginary spaces and imagination) and like the Whirlpool commercials, makes this the natural space of children and women.
Whirlpool has also been using underwater spaces as a way to market dishwashers, washing machines, and general cleanliness.
This one is very similar to the Ariston commercial on the previous post: also for a washing machine, also zooming out at the end to reveal the washing machine, and also focusing on schools of sock-fish and blanket-rays. The difference is that, instead of being a little boy’s vision, it focuses on a beautiful (mermaid-like) woman swimming amidst and in awe of the beautiful underwater life/clothing.
And this ad for a dishwasher makes dishes into a coral reef. This time, the underwater dishes-reef cuts away to a woman standing on the edge of the ocean, being sprayed with foamy white water.
So what is it exactly with this trend of cleaning appliance advertisements and underwater spaces? Did they all happen to come up at the same time or are some of these knock offs?
Another underwater commercial involving a washing machine. The spot starts out with a hand closing the washing machine, we zoom in through the front window, the frame disappears and we are underwater. What seems to be fish and rays are really socks and blankets. The space is pristine and magical - at the end we zoom back out to see a little boy gazing in (as through a porthole). The voice says, “the new Ariston Aqualtis. Deeply different.”
This commercial, like the Farmers insurance spot I wrote about earlier, depicts underwater space (specifically within the washing machine) as a transformative and surreal space where anything is possible (and any type of cleaning is possible). This particular spot won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
Shipwreck Central is a website and online video channel for shipwreck enthusiasts (also the home of the TV documentary The Sea Hunters). The site releases the latest shipwreck news, has a “live dive blog,” and a user contributed map of shipwrecks around the world (which also serves as an interface to viewing underwater video clips).
The site also pitches itself as an base for the shipwreck enthusiast community. There is an active message board with everything from people looking for research help to news about recently found shipwrecks, and there are educational modules for teachers.
Overall, the most compelling part of the site is the underwater video of the shipwrecks. Like the narrative of the treasure hunt these videos follow, the viewer is guided down into the depths to see sites that rarely surface. Some of these videos focus on the divers, who emphasize the beauty of the ships and the difficulties in getting to them, or the initial accident - many of the times this is part of an underwater archaeological expedition, intended to help reconstruct history. Other videos simply showcase the underwater wrecks themselves.
In 2001, the Smithsonian Institution sponsored an exhibit on undersea cables, tracing the history of international communications from 1851. At first, these cables carried telegraph messages, subsequently telephone traffic, and now internet data. The subtitle of the exhibition, “How the Old Become New and Other Seeming Contradictions” refers to the “rebirth” of undersea cabling in the form of fiber-optic cables. Now these cables, still predominantly hidden and disregarded in a “wireless age” despite the fact that they channel much of the international communications traffic.
The online version of the exhibition gives an excellent history of the establishment of these cable lines, their inventors, and the technologies that support underwater communication. What is the relationship between underwater media and media in the air? There seems to be an interesting dynamic between the two.
Aquaman is a DC comics superhero who debuted in More Fun Comics in 1941. He subsequently became the star of his own comic books series (Volume 1: 1962-1971, 1977-78; Volume 2: 1991-1992, Volume 3: 1994-2001; Volume 4: 2003-2007). Other spin-offs include animated cartoon show Aquaman (1967-1970) and a 2006 pilot for a TV show (trailer below).
Aquaman parallels Superman and other flying superheroes: while they dominate the skies, defying gravity, he speeds through the ocean. Often his enemies are ocean-related villains that threaten aquatic life: shipping, sailors, etc..
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