OCEAN OF WETNESS

A PLATFORM FOR DESIGN

Ocean of Wetness is committed to imaging and imagining habitation in ubiquitous wetness rather than on a land-water surface. We open new possibilities for the future but also reframe our reading of the past and experience of the present. 

Raison d’être

We live in an all-consuming Ocean of Wetness. Its wetness is everywhere in the air, earth, sea, flora and fauna, precipitating, evaporating, storming, seeping, soaking, transpiring, osmoting, freezing. We are wetness ourselves, our wetness necessary to our existence, necessary to the eye that sees, body that feels, and common sense that knows. This Ocean of Wetness is our planet, a planet that astronauts never leave even when they see their ‘home’ from 20,000 miles away. Wetness is after all in their eyes.

So, when we are told that we live on an Earth surface divided between ‘land’ and ‘water’, it must surely be by design; by a purposeful human assertion. Textbooks teach us that this surface is 30% land and 70% water, but experience tells us that it is 100% land with water in its service: water tasked with supplying and draining land, shaping and improving it, and providing it with energy, transportation, and lucrative waterfronts; water in waterbodies that can be pushed back at will to claim land; water in seas that do little to deter mapping and mining the land beneath for minerals, oil, and natural gas; water that upon occasion protests its subjugation with floods, droughts, and leaks.

It is an amazing shift from an Ocean of Wetness to land, from an immersive to an extractive existence, from a non-binary condition of wetness that can only be worked by gradients of less wet and more wet to a binary of land that is not water and water that is not land. But it is a shift that cannot really happen given that Ocean of Wetness is necessarily our home. What does happen is an ongoing, never-ending design project to craft an Earth surface in Ocean of Wetness and to control the place of water on, above and below it.

Today, with the Earth surface in trouble from rising seas, storm events, melting glaciers, mass migrations, species extinction and social injustice, we have a choice. We can continue to solve problems; or we can acknowledge our place in an Ocean of Wetness, review a design project that is intrinsically problematic, and imagine other ways of inhabiting an Ocean of Wetness, ways that do not necessarily suppose a surface. 

Predisciplinary position

Several disciplines participate in asserting an Earth surface. It is the ‘ground’ they share, a ground that allows observations, conversations, studies and comparisons across difference, a ground that it is in their interest to defend. The ‘sheet’ or ‘screen’ of the geographic map demonstrates both this surface and its commonality. Ocean of Wetness then is necessarily a pre-disciplinary platform. It allows us to ask fundamental questions.

Did Columbus and the conquistadores, missionaries and settlers in his wake take possession of a people’s land or was land their means of taking possession of a people’s place the terms of which are not necessarily grounded on an Earth surface but in another mode of inhabiting an Ocean of Wetness?

Is Mumbai an island on an Earth surface or is it an estuary in an Ocean of Wetness?

Are Mississippi, Nile and Ganga rivers that flow in delineated channels and flood or are they Oceans that increase and decrease in intensity of wetness?

and more

Our practice 

Ocean of Wetness pursues projects that dare to speculate, projects that do not simply assume that people see things differently, but that they see different things or no ‘thing’ at all. We do not aim to solve problems of places so much as induce wonder and venture a new language of place that is likely to be more effective in solving those problems.