Coralations
An Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium lecture, presented as part of BCNM's New Media & Oceans program
with Melody Jue
Professor, English, University of California, Santa Barbara
When we think of Coral with a capital C, what comes to mind is often a stony, branching organism that lives in warm, balmy waters. In this talk, based on my recent book Coralations, I examine how soft corals, cold water corals, and other coralline artwork breaks with the iconicity of Coral to emphasize other connections with petroculture, gender, photography, and feminist handicraft. If Coral usually implies rainbow-hued reefs bathed in a warm water environment with plenty of sunlight, what about the massive reefs of bone-white Lophelia pertusa that exist off the coast of Norway and in cold, deep-sea clusters in the Gulf of Mexico? If Coral assumes stony reef-builders that build up over the life of the colony, then what about certain soft corals, whose fleshy hydroskeletons may bloom and deflate with the changing of the tides? The reflections that follow work through how an iconic sense of Coral lends itself to certain media analogies—to photography, to books—analogies which turn out to not be so universal, when one pays attention to the life-worlds and milieu-specific relations of particular corals.
About Melody Jue
Melody Jue is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She regularly collaborates with artists and scientists, bringing experience as a scuba diver to many of her writings. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), which won the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science book award, and Coralations (2025). Her co-edited collections include Saturation: An Elemental Politics with Rafico Ruiz, and Informatics of Domination with Zach Blas and Jennifer Rhee. Professor Jue has published articles in journals including Grey Room, Configurations, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Resilience, and Media+Environment. You can read more about her work at: https://www.melodyjue.info/.
About Art, Technology, & Culture Colloquium
Founded by Professor Ken Goldberg in 1997, the Arts, Technology & Culture lecture series at BCNM is an internationally respected forum for creative ideas. Always free of charge and open to the public, the series has presented over 200 leading artists, writers, and critical thinkers who question assumptions and push boundaries at the forefront of art, technology, and culture.
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