Introduction: Coralations

Living coral is the iconic surface underneath which we must dive. I have intentionally chosen Pantone’s “Living Coral” for the cover of this small book in order to explore the question of what exceeds, or deviates from, the common imaginary of corals. Within the volumetric space between the book’s coralline covers, I draw attention to the inadequacy of any one color for addressing the range of variation in actual corals, unfolding the ways that artists and scholars have used corals to rethink relations with gender, empire, and media.

Coralations is a philosophical exploration of the many corals that do not conform to the iconicity of Coral.1 When we think of Coral with a capital C—and I use “we” to indicate a broad public that reads and produces discourse about global corals—what comes to mind is something like this: a stony, branching organism that lives in warm, balmy waters. Coral alternates between signifying an organism and signifying an environment, all too often imagined as a tourist destination, tropically distributed. In Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, and Visual Modernity (2019), Ann Elias cautions that even in the early twentieth century, “Photographers and cinematographers saw an opportunity to generate on film a coral orientalism,” treating coral as a colorful and exotic other to promote a homogenous view of the tropics.2 Troubling the boundaries between animal, vegetable, and mineral, corals are scientifically described as colonial organisms, colonies of tiny polyps that slowly build calcium carbonate skeletons and live symbiotically with pigment-giving algae. Corals are also icons of precarity: they are in danger of bleaching when ocean waters become too warm, causing them to eject their symbiotic algae and turn bone white. A photograph of bleached-white coral is, to use a term from Roland Barthes, a type of denoted or “non-coded iconic” image—an image easy to mistake as purely literal (or “naïve”), even as it emits all kinds of learned significations.3 Where Barthes famously analyzed the effect of “Italianicity” in a Panzani pasta ad, the bleached-white images of coral suggest mournability, drawn from the viewer’s external knowledge of climate change and the repeated exposure to images of corals dying—a narrative that Irus Braverman focuses on in The Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (2019), tracking the way coral scientists negotiate feelings of hope and despair.

If Coral usually implies rainbow-hued reefs bathed in a warm-water environment with plenty of sunlight, what about the massive reefs of bone-white Lophelia pertusa that exist off the coast of Norway and in cold, deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico? If Coral assumes stony reef-builders that build up over the life of the colony, then what about soft corals, whose fleshy hydroskeletons bloom and deflate with the changing of the tides? In the reflections that follow, I work through how an iconic sense of Coral lends itself to certain media analogies—to photography, to books—analogies that turn out to not be so universal when one pays attention to the life-worlds and milieu-specific relations of particular corals.

Environmental media is a capacious field of study: it includes media that represent the environment or environmentalist concerns, but also elements of the environment that perform analogous functions as anthropogenic forms of media, including the transmission, storage, and processing of information.4 What I mean by environmental media in this book includes elements of the environment that perform mediating effects—such as the role of seawater as a kind of photographic lens, filtering sunlight toward the upstretched tentacles of coral and their photosynthesizing algae.5 The documentary Chasing Coral (2017), directed by Jeff Orlowski, anticipates and captures the process of a devastating coral bleaching event near New Caledonia but also examines some of the ways that corals are forms of archival media for the ocean climate. Just like terrestrial trees, stony corals also possess growth rings that accrete over a lifetime. In this way, stony corals slowly build up like stone books, mortared in place through the secretions of the living polyps. Yet as we will see, soft corals do not build such stratigraphic layers—their vibrantly colored bodies leave few traces when they die, as ephemeral as the petals of a flower. If not all corals are books, then how effective are conservation narratives that use the book as an analogy, taking disappearing reefs as akin to losing a library? How can we develop storytelling tactics that address the diversity and range of coral relations, when the protagonist does not just default to stony, reef-building corals?

The bias towards reef-building, or hermatypic, corals exists across both the sciences and humanities, shaping research questions, data sets, and narratives. In the sciences, attention to tropical corals is related to access and funding; it is much easier to study corals in shallow tropical waters than deep-water corals like Lophelia pertusa, which require expensive equipment (boat time, Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], sonar technologies) that is often easiest to acquire through cooperation with industries—particularly the oil industry, which already uses these technologies for prospecting. In addition, many scientific maps of the global distribution of coral center on warm-water corals completely, leaving out the geographic distribution of cold-water corals.6 This has likely had an effect on the humanities: to the best of my knowledge, all of the book-length humanities studies of coral focus on tropical stony corals, with the one exception of Malcolm Shick’s excellent visual history Where Corals Lie (2018)—though Shick himself is a retired coral biologist.7

In this book, the word coralations is a portmanteau that evokes coral correlations, and coral relations—those things or conditions that share a notable connection or interdependency with corals. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the word correlation as the “mutual relation of two or more things” to the sixteenth century, while the statistical sense of correlation as the “interdependence of two or more variable quantities such that a change in the value of one is associated with a change in the value or the expectation of the others” originates with eugenicist Francis Galton in the nineteenth century.8 “Correlation’s eugenicist history matters,” media theorist Wendy Chun reminds us, “not because it predisposes all uses of correlation towards eugenics, but rather because when correlation works, it does so by making the present and future coincide with a highly curated past,” enacting “a future that would repeat their discriminatory abstractions.”9 In her important study of big data industries, Chun evaluates how correlations become tied to predictions, a practice which risks reifying protected categories such as race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Taking Chun’s precautions seriously, Coralations is not about applying an abstract theory of correlation to the study of corals, but about addressing the implications of correlating corals with the tropics, color, symbiosis, books as archival media, and photography—and how this impacts how we write about climate change.

“Coralation” is a pun that has independently occurred to many people. For example, the nonprofit organization CORALations, founded in 1995 by Mary Ann Lucking and Orlando Peraza, focuses on coral conservation in Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean.10 Similarly, artist Nicholas Magnan’s 2022 film Core Coralations dwells with an archive of coral core samples at the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s Coral Core facility and the specter of impending coral death.11 The film visually plays with how scientists use UV lighting to detect correlations between coral growth bands and environmental changes.12 In her evocative 2022 short essay, “Coralations: Returning to Breath,” Irus Braverman imagines coralations as a way of thinking through the intimacies of corals as multispecies assemblages, co-saturating with law.13 Braverman writes that the idea of “coralations” came to her “when contemplating the vibrant interrelations among various coral parts as well as between corals and other living beings,” and like Magnan, notes the important correlations between coral reefs and climate.14 The aim of this book differs from Braverman’s essay in its aspiration to not only trace dominant coralations (corals with tropicality, corals with records of the climate) but to think with corals that actively question and break normative coralations or stereotypes about Coral, building up pictures of other possible coralations to be addressed—for example, the coralation between Lophelia pertusa and sites of petroleum infrastructure and extraction (chapter 3).

In this book, my method is to follow a concept and explore how it offers a window—or, following Ghosh, an aperture—into the iconicity of Coral, centering moments in which such iconicity no longer holds. Sometimes this means following particular coral species, and sometimes this means examining how aesthetic engagements with corals lead us to question long-standing assumptions. To offer a brief sketch of the narrative to follow, Coralations begins by examining the dominant coralations of tropical stony corals (chapter 1, “Building”), then shifts to moments where they break down (chapter 2, “Softness”), examines how new coralations with petromodernity come into focus with cold-water corals (chapter 3, “Coldness”), traces how corals themselves have inspired ways of uncorrelating constructs like gender (chapter 4, “Grafting”), analyzes how corals have been the subjects of and models for algorithmic correlations (chapter 5, “Optimization”), and concludes with a close reading of Craig Santos Perez’s “Sonnet by the Edge of a Reef” (Conclusion, “Edges”). These chapters interweave a range of media forms, including speculative fiction (Nalo Hopkinson, Ken Liu), documentary film (Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Coral), photography (Nadia Huggins), poetry (Craig Santos Perez), visual art (Christine and Margaret Wertheim, Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef; Ellen Gallagher, Coral Cities), and interactive media (NeMO-Net app). Such a range of media forms is necessary, as I will show, because of the ways that corals and media forms are reciprocally thought through each other. For example, while corals have been the objects of photography and photomosaic surveys, in Coral Empire Ann Elias traces how corals have been thought of, ontologically, as photosensitive media in the lens-like clarity of tropical waters; however, this media analogy does not hold for cold-water corals (chapter 3), which do not have symbiotic algae and live in deep, dark habitats. In another feedback loop, algorithms have been developed to process large photographic data sets of corals, while at the same time, corals have served as models for developing problem-solving algorithms (chapter 5).

The iconic imaginary of Coral is not something I want to entirely throw away; after all, it has been mobilized in environmentalist discourse to cultivate a widespread public care for the importance of coral reef environments, from their visual beauty to their importance as habitats and nurseries for all kinds of fish and other marine life. Coral can be a powerful icon, one of the few invertebrates to gather sustained public attention; and notably, Coral does this as an organism without a face. However, the iconic imaginary of Coral also standardizes, homogenizes, and normativizes a sense of corals. This narrows the kinds of stories we can tell, simplifies their relations, and forecloses a more capacious environmental media imaginary. My hope is that rethinking the limitations of Coral, through the mediations of particular corals in specific contexts of place, will lead to new, unexpected, and compelling environmental narratives that capture public attention—rather than reproduce a sense of despair upon hearing the same narratives of dying reef systems. Thinking past the iconicity of Coral is a kind of accounting that should lead to more expansive senses of environmental media, more inclusive goals for multispecies justice, and more nuanced forms of oceanic care work.

Notes

1. 1. I capitalize Coral when it refers to the broad public imagination of corals.

2. 2. Ann Elias, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019), 21.

3. 3. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–51.

4. 4. Friedrich Kittler, Dracula’s Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Liepzig, Germany: Reclam, 1993), 8.

5. 5. Irus Braverman, Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018).

6. 6. Allen Coral Atlas, https://allencoralatlas.org/.

7. 7. Coral books in the arts and humanities that focus on tropical, stony corals include Ann Elias, Coral Empire (2019); C. Ann Klaus, Drawing the Sea Near (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020); Greg Dvorak, Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018); Irus Braverman, Coral Whisperers (2018). There is one chapter in Peter Godfrey Smith’s Metazoa that philosophically reflects on soft corals. In terms of article-length works, see “Lophelia pertusa Conservation in the North Sea Using Obsolete Offshore Structures as Artificial Reefs” by Paulina Bergemark and Dolly Jørgenson, Marine Ecology Progress Series 516 (December 3, 2014): 275–80. There is also some archaeological/historical research about cold-water corals: referencing Sophie Ann Adams’s unpublished MA thesis, the authors of Grave Goods write, “cold water coral (Lophelia pertusa) washed up from the Atlantic waters around Scotland, represents the nearest source: she [Adams] cites the Roman author Ausonius, who described both the ‘red corals and the white berries, fruit of the shell’ found in these waters” (199), quoted in Grave Goods: Objects and Death in Prehistoric Britain by Anwen Cooper, Duncan Garrow, Catriona Gibson, Melanie Giles and Neil Wilkin (Oxford, UK: Oxbow, 2022).

8. 8. See also Stephen M. Stigler, “Francis Galton’s Account of the Invention of Correlation,” Statistical Science 1, no. 2 (May 1989): 73–79.

9. 9. Wendy Chun, Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2022), 52.

10. 10. CORALations, https://www.coralations.org/about_coralations/index.htm.

11. 11. Nicholas Mangan, “Core Coralations,” https://suttongallery.com.au/exhibitions/core-coralations-death-assemblages/.

12. 12. Nicholas Mangan, personal email, 2023.

13. 13. Irus Braverman, “Coralations: Back to the Breath,” Queensland Review 28, no. 2 (2022): 1–4.

14. 14. Braverman, 2.