We are excited to announce that The Asymmetry International Symposium 2025 will take place on Friday, 25 April, titled ‘Subsea Signals: Maritime Histories, Digital Currents'. Beneath the ocean floor, fibre optic cables pulse with the traffic of our hyperconnected world, transmitting the data of the digital present along maritime corridors forged by centuries of trade, empire, and war. These same oceanic routes remain deeply contested—reshaped today by maritime sovereignty claims, deep-sea extraction, platform capitalism, ocean zoning, and volatile geopolitical currents, including new forms of militarisation and territorial control.
Responding to these shifting currents, Subsea Signals examines how artists and scholars from the Asia Pacific engage with the ocean’s material and historical layers, transforming submerged traces into speculative archives where sunken histories resurface through digital flows, and hidden networks suggest alternative modes of transmission and connectivity.
The programme convenes live readings, film screenings, presentations, and panel discussions to trace the fluid intersections of maritime history and digital technologies. The first section, ‘Submerged Histories,’ explores colonial legacies of indentured labour and forced migration through sonic interventions, sonar mappings, and other speculative methods—charting routes of deportation, diaspora, and unresolved returns. The second, ‘Digital Flows,’ interrogates socio-technical systems—from cloud infrastructures to hydropower networks—as extensions of colonial territoriality, while tracking how artists and scholars expose their material impacts (deep-sea mining) or reimagine their logics (whale song as counter-archive).
Through these diverse artistic and scholarly interventions, Subsea Signals maps the undercurrents where hidden histories and emerging technologies intersect—revealing patterns of exploitation and resistance that reverberate across oceanic spaces, while imagining new possibilities for connection beyond existing power structures.
Co-organised by Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt (Director, Asymmetry), Dr Wenny Teo (Senior Lecturer, Modern and Contemporary Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Dr Yayu Zheng (Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art).