CAC Talks 丨 Bodies Between the Waves: From Navigation Techniques to Oceanic Perception

While terrestrial knowledge depends on measurable stability, oceanic experience moves through drift and sensation. Orientation emerges not from fixed coordinates but from the body’s encounter with currents and wind, with salt in the air, stars overhead, and the subtle guidance of ancestral presence.

In this conversation, artist Kyle McDonald reflects on a pivotal shift in his recent artistic trajectory. His work has moved from experimenting with machine learning, computer vision, and social technologies to engaging deeply with ecological, oceanic, and nonhuman knowledge systems. This transition marks a growing concern not only with the limits of technology but also with how it shapes our ways of relating to the world.

This transformation emerged from his field collaborations in the Solomon Islands, where he worked alongside Polynesian navigators.Working with Luke Vaikawi from Taumako Island and anthropologist Dr. Marianne “Mimi” George, Kyle investigated a mysterious light known as Te Lapa. Said to emerge from distant islands during nighttime sea travel, this faint flash appears briefly across the water to guide navigators when they lose their bearings. Still imperceptible to imaging technologies, Te Lapa is not seen as an observable physical event, but as a signal passed through ancestral presence, revealing itself only when body, ocean, and spirit come into resonance.After repeated expeditions and long nights at sea, Te Lapa remained uncaptured. This failure redirected his attention toward an alternative understanding: the invisible itself may constitute a mode of knowledge. Moving beyond evidence-based frameworks, he turned to the stories, tonalities, and bodily gestures of the navigators to reconstruct a felt trace of the phenomenon.

SUN Jiyuan will follow by examining the diverse forms of nautical charts and navigational instruments. Drawing comparisons between indigenous Chinese systems, Western maritime traditions, and Pacific Island voyaging practices, he explores how these technologies not only reflect different cognitive models but also function as tools for extending perception and transmitting collective memory. They encode the shared, inherited, and adapted experiences of communities encountering the sea.

The discussion will ultimately move across the terrains of mapping and intuition, instruments and oral traditions. It will reconsider navigation as a generative epistemic practice, one grounded in ethics, perception, and embodied relation. Within modern epistemological frameworks, orientation is often reduced to coordinate-based positioning, and knowledge is validated through images, data, and verifiability.As distant signals ripple across the sea and digital infrastructures shape daily life, might we begin to loosen our desire for clarity, and instead place our trust in knowledges that must be sensed rather than proven?