Whale Time in Moving Pictures: Wu Tsang’s 'Of Whales'

One of a body of works inspired by Melville’s Moby-Dick, Wu Tsang’s 2022 digital installation, “Of Whales,” experiments in representing a whale’s point of view. Created on a video gaming platform and projected on a huge horizontal screen, “Of Whales” depicts the undersea world: jellyfish, sperm whales, and forests of ropy kelp. The video follows the hour-long cycle of a whale’s breath: about every hour, the whale surfaces and viewers glimpse the surface and sky. The installation radically affirms nonhuman life and decenters human time for the yawning expanses of whale time.

In this paper, I contextualize Tsang’s “Of Whales” within a long history of moving picture representations of whales and whaling, going back to the 1848 Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World by Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington. The moving panorama is an artifact from the whaling industry that Wu Tsang explicitly critiques in her suite of queer, decolonial cetacean works. Russell and Purrington’s moving panorama compresses myriad scenes of extractive and settler colonial violence into 1,275 feet of canvas. The panorama’s timescales are anthropocentric—even Anthropocenic—but this panorama, like Tsang’s installation, resorts to inventive formal strategies to represent nonhuman time and the intertwined lifeworlds of humans and whales.

Taken together, these cetacean moving pictures aid us in imagining what Amitav Ghosh has called the “unthinkable” reality of climate change: the histories of resource extraction and imperial power that are producing the slow violence of climate change, and the climate-changed futures we might create.