5. Optimization

In scientific discourse, many corals are called “colonial organisms,” a term for denoting the ontological ambiguity between the individual polyp and the community of many to which it metabolically belongs. However, this usage risks becoming an instance of what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” a normalization of the word “colonial” detached from its broader associations with Indigenous dispossession and empire building.1 Consider the possible alternatives for describing the multiplicity of coral being: coral as collectivity, coral as assemblage, or even coral as socialist. Coralations has examined artworks and narratives that center such forms of multiplicity, from the community project of crocheting the Hyperbolic Coral Reef to Nadia Huggins’s practice of collage in her photographic diptychs, and the coral colonization of cruise ships in Nalo Hopkinson’s “Repatriation.” In this chapter, I turn to photo mosaics.

I have elsewhere argued that the mosaic names not only a form of art, but a particular epistemic practice in the ocean sciences.2 One of the most common modes of surveying coral reefs—tropical or deep-water—is through taking high-resolution photographs and then digitally stitching them into a larger photomosaic. For example, the University of Miami, supported by the U.S. Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), has developed software tools for generating underwater landscape mosaics from both video and photographic coral reef surveys.3 This method of surveying has much higher resolution than, say, taking a single photograph from closer to the surface, which would have to see through a larger volume of opaque seawater. Scripps Institution of Oceanography has a long-term monitoring project located on Palmyra Atoll, creating a time-series of more than one thousand photoquadrats of benthic reefs. The images were then manually traced in Photoshop, outlining “the borders of all live hard coral colonies, algal patches (i.e., turf, crustose coralline algae, and macroalgae separately), and any other benthic components—including soft corals and other invertebrates, within each photoquadrat. All organisms were then identified to the finest possible taxonomic resolution with a corresponding swatch color indicating their genus, species, or functional group.”4 The resulting abstractions look a bit like the pattern of camouflage in rainbow hues, ready for computational analysis through the careful preparation of hand-tracing corals. These are but two examples of a common practice of photomosaic reef surveyal, either involving underwater photography conducted by scuba divers, or drone and satellite imaging through clear waters.

The challenge with this type of photomosaic survey is, how to count all the coral in the images? What to do with the mass of survey data? One gamified solution to the backlog of uncategorized coral photomosaics is the NASA-funded project NeMO-NET (Figure 5), a “a single player iPad game where players help NASA classify coral reefs by painting 3D and 2D images of coral.”5 Because the process of hand-identifying coral species or types is slow and laborious, players—interpolated as citizen scientists—are invited to collectively participate in this work. Whereas some institutions collect photographs via diver surveys, NASA acquired the images of coral through drones and satellites, assisted by an algorithm called “fluid lensing,” which edits away the distortions of seawater, mathematically erasing the opacity of the ocean so that it can be seen as if through air. This type of remote sensing assisted by AI processing is an example of what, in Wild Blue Media, I call a “terrestrial bias” calibrated to a human observer, whose normative environment is air rather than water. Even in air, vision is always a matter of mediation, a condition that is especially noticeable for human beings descending into underwater environments.6 The images in the database of NeMO-NET are not so much about immersing humans in underwater worlds as they are about bringing underwater corals into the air-based Umwelt of human beings, a precondition for their surveyal and classification.

NeMO-NET also presents a new subject of coralation: the algorithm. As players progress through the game, identifying corals, their actions contribute to teaching a neural network how to better identify thousands of photographic images of coral reefs: “Data from the NeMO-Net game is fed to NASA NeMO-Net, the first neural multi-modal observation and training network for global coral reef assessment.”7 NeMO-NET then “leverages NASA’s Supercomputer, Pleiades, to use game data to classify and assess the health of coral reefs around the world.”8 Here, the algorithm is interpellated as a student, trained to make more accurate coralations between photographic objects and species and thus assist in establishing baseline estimates of coral populations around the world. Importantly, this process of training the algorithm to make coralations requires the labor of humans. They teach the algorithm how to identify corals through tracing them in images; then, scientists to program the app to teach citizen scientists how to accurately identify the corals. Human labor and machine labor co-participate in a cycle of taxonomic accounting, coralating photographic images with coral species.9 The process of training the algorithm to make accurate coralations is a project of optimization—increasing the speed of image processing and ensuring that such processing is accurate.

Sometimes Coral is not just the subject of optimization, but the model. For example, Google Coral advertises itself as a “complete toolkit to build things with local AI,” offering a variety of services: object detection, pose estimation, image segmentation, and key phrase detection.10 Its logo evokes both the shape of a branching coral and a circuit board, with a circle at the end of each growth tip, in a color that—not surprisingly—is just a touch more orange than PANTONE 16–1546: Living Coral. And like Pantone, Google Coral is selective about its similarities to living corals: it imagines itself as an optimistic, buoyant, even utopian tool for smart cities, and efficient manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and agriculture. Google’s metaphorical invocation of coral does not allude to coral mortality events, bleaching, or climate change; one might imagine degraded data servers, or vulnerable infrastructures. When AI is coral-like, it is about building networks and optimizing the speed and efficiency of business at the local level, not about environmental precarity.11

If Great Britain saw coral as a model for empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Elias writes, in the twenty-first-century computer programmers see in Coral a model for optimization problems.12 Consider programmer Sancho Salcedo-Sanz’s particular sense of Coral in a 2014 paper entitled, “The Coral Reefs Optimization Algorithm: A Novel Metaheuristic for Efficiently Solving Optimization Problems.” Here, the coral reef optimization (CRO) algorithm is not about making predictions about corals reefs; rather, it uses a selective understanding of coral reef biology as a bio-inspired model, where each coral represents a solution to a problem, encoded as strings of numbers. Each coral/solution is assigned to a square on a grid. The corals then fight for space, and “the reef will progress as long as healthier (stronger) corals (which represent better solutions to the problem at hand) survive, while less healthy corals perish.”13 The algorithm also simulates modes of Coral reproduction, specifically: broadcast spawning, brooding, larvae setting, asexual reproduction, and depredation. “This fight for space, along with the specific characteristics of the corals’ reproduction, produces a robust metaheuristic algorithm shown to be powerful for solving hard optimization problems.”14 I capitalize Coral in this paragraph to emphasize how little it matters, in the algorithm, which coral is modeled; the algorithm relies on precisely the kind of generic and metonymic Coral that I have been keen to critique throughout this book. For Salcedo-Sanz, this universal Coral is useful as a model for solving other mathematical optimization problems, such as the “optimum mobile network deployment and off-shore wind farm design.”15

I see it as a problem that Salcedo-Sanz’s model actively ignores key biological and ecological aspects of coral lifeworlds. For example, he abstracts coral into a few basic criteria: taking up space, competing for space, and reproducing. He also conflates algorithmic process with the language of evolution and genetics. In particular, the model replicates a Spencerian version of Darwinian evolution focusing on “survival of the fittest” encoded into a mathematical process. This anachronistic notion of Darwinian evolution ignores many twentieth-century updates, critiques, and qualifications of competition as the defining feature of evolution—specifically, the way that cooperation and symbiosis have also been key drivers, as in the transformative work of Lynn Margulis.16 And as noted earlier, Irus Braverman centers symbiosis as a key element of coralations: “The symbiotic algae-microbes-animal relationship at the core of the corals’ precarious existence reveals that, more than a single unified entity, corals are ‘coralations’—bundles of constantly changing associations that shape and reshape their ways of being in the world and, therefore, the world itself.”17 Although I discuss how cold-water corals are an exception to algal symbiosis in chapter 3, such cooperative ecological arrangements are still common among many corals. These relationships have no place in Salcedo-Sanz’s model, which individualizes both corals and solutions. This is, in part, an effect of what Stefan Helmreich identifies as the “genetic algorithm,” a “class of procedure that ‘evolves’ solutions to problems by generating populations of possible solutions, and then by treating these solutions metaphorically as individuals that can ‘mate,’ ‘mutate’ and ‘compete’ to ‘survive’ and ‘reproduce.’”18

The algorithm, here, is a site of profound anthropomorphization and individualization. This individualization is possible because Salcedo-Sanz’s model operates without the variable of the ocean as an environment, replete with bacteria, viruses, and other floating microbes. Recent discussions of the organismic “holobiont”—a name that accounts for the host plus many other species living in/around it—includes these cooperative partners and how they benefit corals.19 Though some corals do fight each other for space on reefs, their mutualistic relationships with microorganisms erode the easy sense that a coral is only a competitive individual, rather than a “concretion of cooperative processes.”20

Where does this leave us? Coral photographs form the content of data sets upon which algorithms are trained, but corals have also been invoked as the forms or models for optimization algorithms. Put more directly: corals are classified by algorithms, and algorithms are sometimes analogized to corals. This is a process of mutual shaping, or backreading, whereby analogy to corals provides some understanding of algorithmic operations, even as algorithms are developed toward studying corals themselves.

Optimization enters into conversations about coral in other ways. Consider the genetic engineering of corals that are optimized for warmer oceans and more acidified seas, or the aquarist’s struggle to achieve the optimal conditions for growing coral inside tanks, or the conservationist’s attempt to design artificial underwater structures optimized for grafted corals.21 In these contexts, optimization is about anticipating the sensitivities of coral in a warming world and intervening at the level of the genome, or adjusting the conditions of an artificial environment. Alexander Galloway writes that optimization is highly pragmatic, concerned with the here and now: “[t]he highest point of a curve, or alternately the lowest point, the fastest time, or the slowest, the brightest white, the dimmest black, or the greyest grey—the particular quality is unimportant, only the fact that each quality is the ‘best,’ or at least best suited to the conditions at hand.”22 Coral conservation makes do with un-ideal circumstances in order to optimize coral survivability, but can corals themselves interrupt processes of optimization?

Ken Liu’s science fiction short story, “Dispatches from the Cradle: 48 Hours on the Sea of Massachusetts” (2016) explores this very question.23 “Dispatches” imagines a post-diluvian future where much of Earth’s affluent population has fled off-world, leaving behind a far hotter and storm-ravaged Earth for those who could not afford to leave. The people who stayed lead either underground or archipelagic lives. They shelter from the inhospitable Earth through climate-controlled architectures, such as bubbles that can submerge to ride out the worst storms. The story takes the form of a feature article, told by an unnamed journalist who incorporates fragments of writings by a Thoreau-like figure: Asa-<whale>-<tongue>-π (a name incorporating Unicode characters), a former managing director with JP Morgan Credit Suisse on Valentina Station, Venus. Asa “was responsible for United Planet’s public offering thirty years ago, at the time the biggest single pooling of resources by any individual or corporate entity in history” and for convincing “a wearied humanity scattered across three planets, a moon, and a dozen asteroid habitats to continue to invest in the Grand Task—the terraforming of both Earth and Mars.”24 Asa is introduced as a figure of optimization, a skilled negotiator enacting a vision to return Earth to an optimally habitable climate. Yet she becomes the subject of fascination when, one day, she quits her job as the youngest managing director of JPMCS, divorces her husbands and wives, liquidates her assets, and returns to live on Earth—buying a standard “survival habitat kit, one identical to the millions used by refugee communities all over the planet,” and “setting herself afloat like a piece of driftwood.”25 Whereas many science fiction stories ask the question “is it ethical to terraform X planet,” “Dispatches” asks: how ethical is it to want to terraform Earth back into its previous temperate state, after climate change? For whom might Earth’s hotter climate be, in fact, optimal?

This question of optimal climate comes to concern corals and coral-like communities. In one scene, Asa takes the journalist to a notable colony of corals growing in the “Sea of Massachusetts,” covering over what was the campus of Harvard University.

Slowly, we descended toward the coral reef that had grown around the ruined hulk of what had once been the largest university library in the world. Around us, schools of brightly colored fish wove through shafts of sunlight, and tourists gracefully floated down like mermaids, streams of bubbles trailing behind their artificial gills. Asa guided the habitat in a gentle circle around the kaleidoscopic sea floor in front of the underwater edifice, pointing out various features. The mound covered by the intricate crimson folds of a coral colony that pleated and swirled like the voluminous dress of a classical flamenco dancers had once been a lecture hall named after Thoreau’s mentor, Emerson [. . .] the tiny bump in the side of another long reef, a massive brain-shaped coral formation whose gyri and lobes evoked the wisdom of generations of robed scholars who had once strolled through this hallowed temple of knowledge.

Consider how this passage dramatizes a Shakespearean “sea change” not of bones turned into corals, as in Ariel’s song in The Tempest, but of Harvard’s Widener Library turned into a coral reef. Such a transformation centers the media form of the book, superseded by corals as a surviving informatic form. The corals also evoke another archival form of memory: the human brain. The “intricate crimson folds” of a “massive brain-shaped coral” echo Harvard’s school color, and replace a hall named after Emerson. This invocation of brain coral differs from the juxtaposition we saw in Nadia Huggins’s photography, in which coral is more like a cognitive extension than a replacement for the “wisdom of generations of scholars.”

The reef in “Dispatches” embodies a type of specialized knowledge that is particular to the newly evolved corals: knowledge of how to thrive in the conditions of what Bill McKibben would call Eaarth, our planet made alien and unrecognizable due to the intensifications of climate change.26 In Adrift, her memoir within Liu’s story, Asa recalls how the corals had unexpectedly, “developed new symbiotic relationships with artificial nanoplate-secreting algae engineered by humans for ocean-mining” (italics original) and even acquired their pigments—even Harvard crimson—from heavy metals and pollutants left on Earth. At Widener Library, the corals are particularly bright “because this area was touched by the hand of mankind the longest. Beautiful as they are, these corals are incredibly fragile. A global cooling by more than a degree or two would kill them. They survived climate change once by a miracle. Can they do it again?”27 For Asa, corals interrupt the fantasy of re-terraforming Earth for which she had once fought. In this quote, she asks the journalist (narrator) to consider what forms of life would suffer or perish from the re-optimization of the climate for human comfort. Such a question about the difference between optimal climates for the new corals and humans engages what media scholar Yuriko Furuhata calls “thermostatic desire,” defined as “a technophilic desire to posit atmosphere itself as an object of calibration, control, and engineering.”28 In “Dispatches,” the ocean is a space that has become a refuge for corals as well as some human communities, yet the thermostatic desire of re-terraforming could kill off the corals or push out the surviving human communities with re-colonization by off-worlders.

Through Asa’s writings, Liu portrays surviving human communities on Earth in a manner similar to the corals (or to use Asa’s term, algal mats)—surviving collectives that take refuge underwater. Rather than floating individualistically like the libertarian Seasteading movement, in her memoir, Asa describes communities that are materially interconnected:29

The floating family habitats connect to each other in tight clan-strands that weave together into a massive raft-city. From above, the city looks like an algal mat composed of metal and plastic, studded with glistening pearls, dewdrops or air bubbles—the transport domes and solar collectors for the habitats. The Singapore Refugee Collective is so extensive that it is possible to walk the hundreds of kilometers from the site of sunken Kuala Lumpur to the surviving isles of Sumatra without ever touching water—though you would never want to do such a thing, as the air outside is far too hot for human survival. When typhoons—a near constant presence at these latitudes—approach, entire clan-strands detach and sink beneath the waves to ride out the storm. The refugees sometimes speak not of days or nights, but of upside and downside.30

Here, the clan-strands are a biotechnical hybrid, evoking marine forms (algal mat, pearls, dewdrops) and anthropogenic materials (metal and plastic). Like the corals that replace Widener Library, the clan-strands come to replace islands themselves, an archipelagic substitute connecting “sunken Kuala Lumpur to the surviving isles of Sumatra.” Importantly, the movement of submerging is not only associated with loss of cities like Kuala Lumpur and other Atlantis-type figures, but as a strategy of adaptation—a way for the clan-strands to temporarily shelter from atmospheric storms. The capacity for clan-strand habitats to submerge themselves models a new orientation to time, experienced not through “days or nights, but of upside and downside.” More than a force of terrestrial dispossession through rising sea levels, the ocean is recoded here as a space of insulation and refuge.

Asa is both the focus of “Dispatches” and but one part of its perspectival constellation. The journalist narrator describes Asa’s habitat as appearing like “the pupil of some sea monster’s eye staring into the sky” with Asa standing atop, “her back as straight as the gnomon [needle] of a sundial.”31 When the journalist first meets Asa, she “turned and gestured for me to descend through the transparent and open ‘pupil’ into the most influential refugee bubble in the Solar System.”32 Playing on the pun between pupil-as-student and pupil as an anatomical part of the eye, Asa is a focalizing element of the story, and we find Earth’s new corals refracted through her perspective. At the same time, “Dispatches” challenges Asa’s romanticized description of the ocean and Singapore Refugee Collective through the voices of characters who live there: one person who adamantly claims not to be a refugee because they stayed, and one who left for a scholarship off-world but wants Earth to be re-terraformed in order to lessen the suffering of her community. Liu constellates Asa’s perspective with these other points of view that question the conditions of sovereignty: who has or should have the power to decide Earth’s climate future?

Even if eyes are constant, faces in the story are ever-changing. Upon first meeting Asa, the journalist narrator notes, “she looked exactly like her last public scan-gram” to which she replies, “I don’t get many visitors [. . .] There’s not much point to putting on a new face every day.” This detail suggests a that the technology exists to change one’s face as easily as changing clothes. Compare this with Asa’s reflections in Adrift, where she observes the night sky and proclaims, “I realized, with a startled understanding reminiscent of the clarity of childhood, that the face of the heavens was a collage,” with light from each star a different age when it arrives at Earth. Later, Asa writes that “the surface of the planet is as inconstant as our faces: lands burst forth from the waters and return beneath them; well-armored lobsters scuttle over seafloors that but a geologic eyeblink ago had been fought over by armies of wooly mammoths; yesterday’s Doggerland may be tomorrow’s Sea of Massachusetts.”33 Asa appears to naturalize the changeability of the human face through analogy with the collage-like, or mosaic-like, temporality of the face of the heavens; and in so doing, naturalize the surface of the planet as an ever-changing face, suggested by the “geologic eyeblink.”34 Such a perspective of constant change might seem to justify the very re-terraforming process that Asa opposes.

Yet in the story, corals are also agents of change, ocean terraformers and builders that ontologically are environments and make environments. As environments and builders, then, are coral reefs also a collage that is inconstant? Is the collage an aesthetic form that gives face to otherwise faceless marine invertebrates—a form of collectivity that resists optimization?

Notes

1. 1. Mark Rifkin, “Settler Common Sense,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 322–40.

2. 2. Melody Jue, “‘Pixels May Lose Kelp Canopy’: The Photomosaic as Epistemic Figure for the Satellite Mapping and Modeling of Seaweeds,” Media+Environment 3, no. 2 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.21261.

3. 3. “High Resolution Landscape Mosaics for Coral Reef Mapping and Monitoring,” https://nmsfloridakeys.blob.core.windows.net/floridakeys-prod/media/archive/review/documents/ermosaicscoralmonitoring.pdf.

4. 4. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, “Long-Term Monitoring of Benthic Coral Reef Communities,” https://coralreefecology.ucsd.edu/long-term-monitoring-of-benthic-coral-reef-communities/.

5. 5. NeMO-NET, http://nemonet.info/. My thanks to Colin Milburn for the reference.

6. 6. In his essay “Looking Through the Surface” in Liquid Door, D. Graham Burnett asks why we can’t see clearly underwater? “You are, as you know, basically water. Now, when you stare into the liquid around you, there is, in effect, no interface” and as a medium “you have collapsed into yourself” (35). What swimming goggles do is reintroduce a pocket of air—the interface—between our eyes and the ocean, so that we can see clearly again. The seawater even provides a little extra magnification, which is why if you’re slightly nearsighted, wearing goggles gives your focus a boost.

7. 7. NeMO-NET, http://nemonet.info/.

8. 8. NeMO-NET.

9. 9. Unfortunately, when I downloaded NeMO-NET in 2023, most of the photographs had already been classified; no 3D images were left, only low-resolution 2D photographs.

10. 10. Google Coral, https://coral.ai/.

11. 11. Some science-fictional imaginations of corals and AI are not so focused on optimization. Cory Doctorow’s short story “I, Row-boat” (2007) imagines a coral reef that suddenly was uplifted into consciousness, in an analogous manner to the AI protagonist of the story: Robbie the row-boat (an obvious pun on robot). The coral reef emerges furious, concerned about its sovereignty and abuse by humans—which could have been admirable in a decolonial context, but is hard to take seriously when its point of view is heavily anthropomorphized. For example, it uses “I/me” pronouns instead of “we/us” (arguably more appropriate for the collective Umwelt of coral) and at one point expresses crass enthusiasm for heteronormative sexual relations when it jumps into a human body.

12. 12. Elias, Coral Empire.

13. 13. Sancho Salcedo-Sanz et al., “The Coral Reefs Optimization Algorithm: A Novel Metaheuristic for Efficiently Solving Optimization Problems,” https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/739768.

14. 14. Salcedo-Sanz et al.

15. 15. Salcedo-Sanz et al.

16. 16. See for example Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (Boston: Basic Books, 1999) that explains the genesis of her theory of endosymbiosis, which—despite initial resistance—is now a well-accepted aspect of how cellular life evolved.

17. 17. Braverman, “Coralations,” 2.

18. 18. Stefan Helmreich, “Recombination, Rationality, Reductionism, and Romantic Reactions: Culture, Computers, and the Genetic Algorithm,” Social Studies of Science 28, no. 1 (February 1998): 39–40.

19. 19. Scott F. Gilbert, “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes,” in Arts for Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, M73–M89 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Pres, 2017).

20. 20. Gilbert, M73.

21. 21. For example, Archireef in Hong Kong, https://archireef.co/; or the USGS suggestion to focus on elkhorn coral, https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/a-window-opportunity-build-coastal-resilience-how-optimize-coral-restoration.

22. 22. Alexander Galloway, “Perfection – Optimization – Absolution,” in Informatics of Domination, eds. Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2025).

23. 23. Ken Liu, “Dispatches from the Cradle: 48 Hours on the Sea of Massachusetts,” Lightspeed Magazine 130 (March 2016), https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dispatches-from-the-cradle-the-hermit-forty-eight-hours-in-the-sea-of-massachusetts/.

24. 24. Liu.

25. 25. Liu.

26. 26. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011).

27. 27. Liu, “Dispatches from the Cradle.”

28. 28. Yuriko Furuhata, Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022), 2.

29. 29. I offer a critique of Seasteading in “Floating Architectures: Fantasies of Safety in Oceanic Riskscapes,” in Media & Risk, ed. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar, 315–27 (New York: Routledge, 2019).

30. 30. Liu, “Dispatches from the Cradle.”

31. 31. Liu.

32. 32. Liu.

33. 33. Liu.

34. 34. I suggest these art forms interchangeably here; while collages have overlapping pieces and mosaics are traditionally made of nonoverlapping tiles, either could adequately serve as an analogy for the points of starlight that Asa describes.