Ocean Media: Digital South China Sea and Gilles Deleuze's Desert Islands

This article explores a new iteration of ocean media, referring to the element of water as an evolving technology of power that transmits sovereignty and territorial claim and the militarized aesthetics of security and circulation. Focusing on the infrastructure of Chinese artificial islanding in the South China Sea and the U.S.-based digital earth intelligence at the Cold War's end, I trace the aesthetics and politics of remote-sensing imagery and a particular kind of digital haunting in which exists an archive of the forgotten space of maritime capitalism. Expanding the methodological horizon of ocean and island studies, I introduce a new genealogy of island philosophy based on the island writings of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.