My book manuscript in progress titled Aqueous Image: Cinema and the Rhetoric of Water at the End of the World examines images of water across an eclectic mix of narrative, documentary, and experimental films.

In describing his concept of the “flesh” of the world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the phrase “aqueous power” to highlight an intercorporeal sense evoked by the fluid and shimmering tactility of water. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty, I use the term “aqueous image” to identify and index images of water and other hydrophilic matter, and/or images that reflect through film form an aesthetics of water.

I argue that inherent in the ontology of the moving image and forming in the history of world cinema is an epistemology and rhetoric of water that outlines the relation between the figure of the liberal human and its impact on global ecological and racial imaginaries. I suggest that media representations of water function as a multisensory perceptual technology that offer alternative imaginations of life that respond to the latest developments in ecocriticism, radical Black thought and Oceanic worldviews, and narratives of posthuman bodies.

Aqueous Earth Catalog is an open source, interactive geospatial visualization tool that will accompany my book manuscript. This tool is a work-in-progress: a proof of concept website can be found here.

Named after the U.S. magazine Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972), whose mission was to inventory tools, methodologies and technologies, and otherwise useful resources in a comprehensive, global scale, the Aqueous Earth Catalog will encourage students and researchers to shift their understanding of the cultures as static and land bound to fluid, dynamic, and interconnected.

In its first iteration, Aqueous Earth Catalog will be a searchable and filterable cartographic database that situates films and videos studied in Aqueous Image on a world map. Please do not hesitate to reach out if:

- you are a fellow researcher, student, web developer, or a specialist in geospatial analysis and want to collaborate, and/or

- you would like to contribute films to be marked on the map.