Over the course of the spring semester, I had been working on several essays pertaining to aquariums across history—from 19th century productions to metaphors of aquariums in cinema. Across these projects, I’d spent a great deal of time considering the mechanics of aquariums: glass, aeration, milieu, and a whole host of other aspects that mediate the encounter between spectators and the aquatic world.
But earlier this year, I had an experience that allowed me to do just that…only out in nature. During spring break—which in academic terms meant in the midst of the early stages of my research project—I visited Catalina Island. My boyfriend and I went on a boat tour around a handful of coves near the main harbor in Avalon. However, it was not a regular boat. Instead, there were dozens of viewing windows submerged under the water through which you could see various marine animals first hand.
The logic of the display felt like aquariums. You came up to a glass and the animals were there. From our end, it was similar to Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific where we had been just one day prior. However these animals came from the deep, appearing and disappearing into the environment in which they naturally (whatever that word means today) live.
What amazes me about this experience is that we, the viewers, are in the equivalent of an “aquarium.” Instead of the regular experience of seeing fish in a glass-encased aquarium that sustains itself on land, we were part of a boat that trapped us with enough air to see fish within their aquatic domain. As these photos show, the fish are quite plain, so the effect—which was undeniably mesmerizing—did not come from their uniqueness. We were not in awe of a lion fish or, as in a zoo, a tiger, or some other near-mythic creature.
Instead, we were simply surrounded by fish that came up to us to feed on the food we blasted at them from the boat. The humbling effect was this sense of seeing them in the wild. Living in cities, I feel I have lost that relationship to animals which are either domestic or quotidian. But, under the sea, I was forced to encounter them eye-level and understand that everything I saw was due to chance.
Addendum (August 15th): The exhilarating moment of finding “aquarium” experiences out in the world apparently also captivated Victor Kossakovsky who recently made the film Aquarela. In an interview with the New York Times he remarked:
“The ice on Lake Baikal is so transparent it looks like a huge aquarium. This is why I came there at the first place.”
As Kossakovsky demonstrates, aquariums, though only a relatively-recent invention of the 19th century, have become a cultural marker and reference, communicating the effect of encounters with water behind glass. This effect drew him in, enticing him for the potentials it offers his cinema as a natural feature that seems to evoke the ubiquitous aquariums that humans have enacted all over the world.