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“Leviathan rising: how the whales became what we wanted them to be,” a lecture by Philip Hoare
January 24 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Taking the recent killer whale interactions with vessels in the eastern Atlantic as his cue, as well as his own experience during just such an event, devoted whalehead, author and curator Philip Hoare uses archive and modern images and film to chart the way the whale has changed in response to our need. Are orcas placid ambassadors of the natural world, apex predators doing their thing, or mutating animatronic future-beings wreaking eco-revenge?
This past year the meme has been: orca “attack”. 500 recorded orca-vessel interventions off the coast of Spain and Portugal since 2021 indicate their desire to return our impact on their world. For all of human-whale history up until now, it is clear that whales have changed their design according to our requirements. For creation myth they were two miles long and swam the seas of Paradise Lost. For dragons at the edge of the world, the Ultima Thule, they sprouted horns and spouted oceans. For the age of extraction they offered ivory teeth to carve, and seminal oil to burn. They were rehearsing our apocalypse. At the height of their own they gave us non-freezing oil to send our rockets into space and, until 1971, the same oil fed the transmissions of almost every American car.
Suddenly in a swerve as we realised what we’d done, we listened to them off the isle of strange noises and decided their sound was designed as poetry. It was a new transmission. Chastened, we watched them leap and cut new shapes out of the sea and sky, and imprisoned their most voracious members as hostages. Now they come back to bite. Or so it seems. Even as we design AI systems to decipher those sounds. This may be the final invasion, the last appropriation. After all, we don’t exactly have a good record in the west for first contact.
Taking the recent and astonishing killer whale interactions with vessels in the eastern Atlantic as his cue, as well as his own experience at the centre of just such an event, devoted whalehead, author and curator Philip Hoare uses archive images and his own dreams to chart the way the whale has changed in response to our need. If we interrupt their alien culture with our own, what then? Ambassadors of the natural world, apex predators doing their thing, or mutating animatronic future-beings: which whales will we choose next, now that it’s down to the wire and down to the deep?
Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including Leviathan, or the Whale, winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson prize. He is co-curator of the https://www.mobydickbigread.com/, and professor of creative writing at the University of Southampton, UK, and regular visitor to Cape Cod. In 2023 his reports and essays on orca interventions have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and in podcasts for the Guardian, VICE, and Al-Jazeera. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philip-hoare
