TY - JOUR TI - Will the Future Be Aquatic? Underwater Cartography, Verticality and Leonardo’s Submarine by Hito Steyerl AU - Kolenda, Karolina TI - Will the Future Be Aquatic? Underwater Cartography, Verticality and Leonardo’s Submarine by Hito Steyerl AB - This text explores the uses of water metaphors in the discourse of digital media on the example of Leonardo’s Submarine, a three-channel AI-generated video work by the artist and writer Hito Steyerl, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2019, as well as its subsequent installation in a purposefully built virtual reality underwater gallery in winter 2020/2021. The two venues for staging the work are discussed in the context of Steyerl’s writings on the change of the European geographical imagination from the Renaissance up to the present day and the role played in this change by digital technologies. Steyerl’s ideas about the shift from the horizontal to vertical perspective and the present condition of groundlessness are “submerged” in a watery context of the ocean to test how verticality and groundlessness behave in an underwater environment. Drawing on selected concepts developed in the field of blue humanities, this text seeks to investigate Steyerl’s practice as an artist and new media theorist to show how it employs water metaphors to challenge rather than perpetuate our habitual thinking about the ocean and the media used to represent it. VL - 2021 IS - Numer 2 (48) Błękitna humanistyka PY - 2021 SN - 1895-975X C1 - 2084-3860 SP - 375 EP - 386 DO - 10.4467/20843860PK.21.024.14081 UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/przeglad-kulturoznawczy/artykul/will-the-future-be-aquatic-underwater-cartography-verticality-and-leonardos-submarine-by-hito-steyerl KW - Hito Steyerl KW - Leonardo da Vinci KW - submarine KW - blue media