5 - Macabre Simulacra

Summary

Abstract

The maritime legacy is the human legacy; it is colonization, war, globalization, climate change, and it is coping with all these things. Yet the void between humans and their watery world remains. Attempting to fill this void, the savior-scholar model has shifted from physical to virtual resurrection. 3D digital shipwreck reconstructions have become the default mechanism for scientists to engage the public with maritime heritage, marketing VR tours with claims to ‘bring history alive’. This chapter first examines the spectator : spectacle paradigm as a byproduct of the savior-scholar model. Recounting the Bayonnaise, wrecked in 1803 off the coast of Finisterre, Spain, it then offers the lasting experience of wonder as substitute for the fleeting commodity of virtual shipwreck exploration.

Keywords: Bachelard; Baudrillard; simulacrum; virtual reality; photogrammetry; Bayonnaise shipwreck

When you gave precedence to interpretation over the movement of life, didn't you thereby choose this fate? … Was there a potential interlocutor for such a thought? Or only a spectator? Or a spectatrix?

[…] To locate herself outside two histories: yours, hers, and the relations between them. In order to admire and reproduce the realization, successfully executed in its final designs, of your becoming. As she cast off all the veils in which she was hidden and imprisoned, she had yet to sustain that destiny which forever set you apart from her, maintaining the (male) one and the other at a definitive distance.

Often located deep underwater, shipwrecks are esoteric. Their spectators, if they have any of the human kind, are the exclusive few possessing both the training and will to meet them in their own environment, which is fundamentally inhospitable to human presence. Even so, the internet is increasingly flooded with 3D digital reconstructions of shipwreck sites so that nearly anyone and everyone might participate in a ‘dry dive’. Photogrammetric models and VR experiences are labeled as democratizing, as they increase public awareness of and access to these sites/sights; they are even said to ‘bring history alive’. As explained in the previous chapters, though, most shipwreck sites are also graveyards, so when digital-exploration advocates claim to resurrect this history, what exactly is being promised and why? And while many virtual explorers seem satisfied with the prospect of immediate visual gratification, what might be lost by turning underwater graveyards into rapidly consumable commodities?