The great sea serpent […] was conceived and born by man's ingenuity and laid on the bottom of the ocean […] People's thoughts rush noiselessly, in all languages, through the serpent of science, for both good and evil.
A drone shot, looking down upon the sea below. In it, a figure—half human, half fish—swims along a boundary where fresh, muddy water meets that of the dark blue deep. The swimmer, Skarnuyte, performing in costume, traces the shifting edge of these two fields—moving upwards from the bottom of the screen to the top. This visual boundary is not a straight line but, rather, a constantly shifting, dissolving limit—blurry, dynamic. Everything that constitutes this margin is in movement.
It is common to interpret mermaids as symptomatic of the male-gaze, figuring fascination and fear with untamed womanhood. Standing for—or, rather, swimming through—all that is wild. The sailor’s attraction to the mermaid uncovers a moral concerning the profundity of sexual desire (in this sense, symbolized by the sea’s fathomless depths), and its apparent danger. And yet, it is worth casting a wider interpretive net. For, mermaids are also a species of projection in the history of the human imagination, exploring transcendence of embodied limits: a fantasy that we might find a home underwater, that our lifeworld—requiring air and solid ground beneath our feet—can be overcome, or that a powerful desire—manifest as the siren’s call—exists for such. That this fantasy is couched as impotent, leading to death, is a function of pre-contemporary understanding.1 In an age of undersea exploration the myth’s tutelary value stands to be revisited.
Today, opposition to human life underwater is unmoored from illud tempus.2 Technological developments have made the viability of human bodies deep beneath the waves possible—and, with it, new prospects concerning our species-being-in-the-world. We can now inhabit the subaquatic realm experientially, through our tools. We can enter—and stay at—the depths of the ocean via scuba suit, and submarine, for periods ever longer. These innovations have played out in parallel with advances in underwater sensing, and chemical analysis, such that the subaquatic imaginary is undergoing a profound expansion.
As this process continues, the sea becomes ever-more subject to what may be termed our trans-atmospheric agency: While biological exploitation continues apace, in the form of industrial overfishing, deep-sea mining companies begin to set their sights on mineral deposits below the seafloor—a prospect with catastrophic implications for marine ecology. A corresponding dive into the abyss has nuclear submarines charting silent courses throughout the great oceans, conveying threats of war and total annihilation to every shore. Perhaps it is better, therefore, that mermaids return, reborn, in order to float the prospect of a viable passage between surface reality and hidden depths; between anthropocentric consciousness and a sub-conscious we may yet require to navigate our new life below water. While one can never fully bracket the gendered implications of science itself as an extractive practice—crystallized in Francis Bacon’s well-known description of ‘hounding nature in her wanderings’—a more transpersonal, indeed, posthuman imaginary is becoming possible.
Skarnulyte’s mermaid appears to serve as a symbol of the passage between our corporeal being and a wider frame. In the first instance, via its duality as both human and animal. But beyond possible filiation with any particular non-human other, such as a fish, her emblem includes the suggestion of a broader intellectual perspective on the ocean; seeing it not as an external resource but as an ecology in which we are already immersed. While the scuba diver’s encounter is mediated by prophylaxis—harking back to the wax that Odysseus placed in his ears to avoid the Sirens’ song—by wetsuit, aqua-lung, etc., the mermaid’s skin and scales are in direct contact with water. And yet, in Sirenomelia (2018), Skarnulyte’s creature also wears high-tech goggles: the red glint in them announcing a hybridity that begins with embodied vulnerability, but which continues onward through technical knowledge, embedding agency within wider systems, indicating that this is an updated vision.
Reappearing across various artworks, including performances on land, the artist’s alter-ego was born in a decommissioned nuclear submarine base. Swimming through its imposing dockyards, this emblem is the obverse double of faceless enterprise below the waves. On its own, a cyborg overstepping of corporeal borders—via scuba suit, or submarine—does not entail an interconnection with oceanic life coherent with ecological thinking or practice. These developments may yet render the whole world a human prosthesis. Rather than anthropomorphizing the ocean, however, Skarnulyte’s mermaid seems ventured as a provocation: to imagine a viable transition between our species self-image and its othering. This is less a question of making aquatic being more human than deepening the human image itself.
Within mermaid iconography mirrors are a recurring motif. The symbolic import of this accoutrement—held in the water-woman’s hand—is often read as relating to allure, and vanity. What of the mirrored ceilings in Skarnulyte’s video installations—reproducing her mermaid’s action onscreen, as well as gallery visitors?
Of course, the archetypical mirror is water. Since mermaids are creatures of the deep, the mirror accoutrement may be said to reflect this relationship. But this shallow observation does not go far enough. Even before the invention of glass—and its perfection by the maritime Venetians—Narcissus had his lake. And while ponds are still and cold, the sea is dynamic; reflections on its surface being apt to warp and shift, to break apart. Both watery mirrors participate in illusion, however; appearing to represent the world—things ‘as they are’ or could be—while inverting the actual situation. They are what they are not—itself, a reasonable description of the mermaid’s liminal identity, if not all of our own.
Above the screen upon which Skarnulyte’s video plays, its doppelganger is installed. Two sides of the same coin, the former partakes of the same trickery as the mirror above: it is all surface, pretending to have depth. Recapitulating one another’s lie, the result is a conceptual mise en abyme; the infinite depth of two empty surfaces in a feedback loop. Mythological mirrors are portals to a different realm, or a means of revealing hidden truths. What if this truth is the emptiness of the image itself? Verisimilitude and antagonism combined. The doubled screen—along with the visitors—elicits a push and pull of identification. Is that really me walking upside down? Could I fall? Such questions are of a similar species to those asked by Narcissus, concerning his reflection. Or else those ventured by a sailor, contemplating the mermaid’s life just below the surface the waves.
So many psychological projections into the void, enabled by the mirror. The other side of the looking glass is constituted by where one cannot be, or whom one cannot have—when contemplated from thisside. And yet, mermaids figure the fantasy that one might comprehend this dimension from an endogenous perspective; facing the boundary condition from its obverse. The water-mirror’s surface is a ‘screen’, properly speaking, then, in the sense that it is a partition; something interposed, screening-off, to conceal from view. Or else, with respect to etymology, something more embodied; ‘protect, defend’ (Old Frisian, skirma); ‘barrier’ (Frankish, skrank); or, more recently, ‘shield’ (Middle Dutch, scherm). The language is immersed in a conflict relating to the security of an inner sanctum. Repulsing the would-be intruder is the main thing, but what is at home? Who is the alien?
In Aphotic Zone (2022) there is a beautiful shot of long silver fish, seemingly at rest, floating vertically. They look like blades of silver grass with big saucer-like eyes. Light catches their mirror-like bellies, their irises, and shimmers. These strange figures appear to convey an alien state: one of active repose, neither sleep nor wakefulness, neither passive nor active. It is a liminal image, in the sense that it invites meditation on the point of interface between human and animal vision, or consciousness. Beyond the visual, the shot seems to frame an intellectual vanishing point, wherein meditation upon the readability of animal expression opens onto the profound mystery that their experience poses in relation to our own; more broadly, what we can think our way into, as people, and what we are shut out from. The mirror is a true anti-thesis.
In Hans Christian Anderson’s well-known tale a mermaid falls in love with a prince of the land. And yet, in his late work The Great Sea Serpent (1871) an old ‘sea-cow’, who is also described as a mermaid, makes an appearance—offering advice to other creatures.3 The subject of her discourse concerns a newly laid underwater telegraph cable—confused by many for an eel or serpent. Is it a coincidence that, in this story of human intrusion into a newly mapped undersea space, Andersen’s cryptid has evolved into a marine mammal from the realm of zoology? And what does ‘she’ have to say? ‘"They want to catch us,” she said; “that's all they live for. […] Don't touch that junk; in time it will unravel and all turn to dust and mud. Everything that comes from up there cracks and breaks—is good for nothing!”’ The story announces a sea-change concerning who and what carries the mark of fantasy: in a mirrorical inversion, the once god-like mermaid appears adrift in the reality principle, while the cable is elevated to the symbolic lacunae par excellence—the ouroboros or Midgard snake. Announcing an age in which the power of our tools arrives at planetary scale, Andersen’s story has the serpent devouring even our self-regard via mirror magic: “The cable didn't move, but it had its own private thoughts, which it had a right to have, considering that it was filled with other's thoughts”.
If you are reading this text online, it is worth recalling a request made by Andersen’s last mermaid, in a world disturbed by subsea cables. ‘“Are you seeking knowledge and wisdom? […] in return I demand that you guarantee safe pasturage on the bottom of the ocean for me and mine.” In this ‘knowledge society’ Skarnulyte’s underwater works attempt to honor that siren’s call.