Flipping the Ship: Ocean Waves, Media Orientations, and Objectivity at Sea

The FLoating Instrument Platform ( FLIP ), a seagoing vessel managed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in La Jolla, California, offers an unorthodox vantage point on sea. In its horizontal conformation, travels like ordinary oceangoing craft. But “flipping” 90 degrees into vertical position once it arrives at destination—with all furniture and instrumentation inside swiveling correspondingly—it becomes enormous spar buoy, more or less stationary wave field. With most platform’s 108-meter length below surface, scientists can work stable environment, which helps them study sea surface phenomena such as waves against largely unwavering baseline. This article anthropologically informed media studies account , author reports working ethnographically alongside this Escheresque setting that often sees shifting between aspirations to steady objectivism moments fleeting but motivating wonder. Placing longer history physical oceanography, also argues what take ocean be has been strongly imprinted techniques technologies—mathematics, photography, spectral analysis, tanks—through have studied come known. Wave science inherits knowledge from mid-twentieth-century observation projects Pacific Ocean were conditioned Cold War American maritime expansion. paper suggests technological mediations, orientations, re-orientations offered may serve allegories for apprehending oceanography’s oscillating visions relationship society, present research future implications, objectivity politics — focus (and their anthropological interlocutors) switch, alternate, flip paradigm scripts frames epistemic reference.