Science Circle Lecture: Exhibiting the Ocean – Communicating Global Challenges

This science circle lecture addresses how we can think about global challenges and by the means of which images and values we need to debate it. It aims at encouraging maritime museums, the science community and the public to take the evolutionary character of the oceans as an assignment for becoming a marketplace of ideas and reflections on how we can face our common future.

Exhibiting the ever-changing sea and ocean ecosystems in a static museum landscape is challenging. Maritime museums therefore tend to focus on singular artefacts, which capture specific memories instead of addressing the topics connected to the changing qualities and global aspects of the ocean such as the evolving shipping industry, tourism, growing blue economy activities and socio-cultural elements.

Any endeavor to visualize and understand global developments is embedded in a very specific tradition of epistemic images. The presentation of global issues in museum needs to take into account the manifold regional and national approaches communicated by representation techniques. It also needs very generally be aware of the ambiguity between complexity and over-simplification which characterizes debates on globalization in this day and age.