Melody Jue: I wonder if you could start by talking about the connection to Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Diving into the Wreck,” which offers such a vivid imagination of lost feminist history through the allegory of diving to the seafloor. The title of your film borrows from this line: “we are the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course / the water-eaten log / the fouled compass.” What attracted you to this line? For some, the “fouled compass” might signal a useless instrument, no longer able to orient. But I wonder if more compasses should be fouled, to make navigators rethink their orientation, their drift.

Madison Bycroft: Yes! I found it interesting to learn that the compass was first a tool for divination, orienting people in relation to their futures, before being used for navigation and exploration. At its most simplified and pared back, I was thinking of the relationship between a compass as a tool for calculated movement, and desire. Very few conquests, expeditions, and colonial pursuits, I imagine, were the result of errant travel, but something more intent with a desired destination or outcome.

Against this, I was interested in making a connection between the practice of floating and those narratives of desire that are not goal oriented. A narrative that doesn’t (try to) arrive, or like an intransitive verb, that doesn’t take an object. 
We are the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course / the fouled compass: measurement has strayed, diverged, or detoured—With a fouled compass, you may set out on a journey, but it’s open, bypassing an economy of achievement. I am also interested in the redemptive qualities of failure, when what we have been taught is “success” is usually synonymous with power, mastery, and dominance. 

MJ: This resonates a lot with me. Unlike mountain climbing, where the peak is the goal, going for a swim, dive, or float can be much less structured. You don’t always swim to something, you just… swim. I think you are onto something with the implications for language: that an oceanic narrative might not arrive or take a grammatical object.

I was taken with the way you engaged with my book Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), especially around the terrestrial bias of human perspective and normative verticality. I spend a good amount of time showing how the ocean unsettles habits of perception. You play with these ideas in such interesting visual ways, especially through reflective surfaces. There’s the glass orb that inverts the horizon and the sea, as the camera circles; the round mirrors that the Floaters hold to reflect the horizon; the surreal digital sequences of frogs melting over patterned faces as a shedding of skin. Could you say a bit about how you were thinking with gravity and verticality? 

MB: Your book has been very important for me over the last year, especially for how I have been thinking about floating and this project. Verticality has quite a tight relationship to being grounded, and fixedness. The desk. The melancholic philosopher in his private room. You write Terrestrial contexts are but one milieu for cognition to press up against; thought might develop entirely differently in an aquatic environment like the ocean. I love this idea, and I’d also like to imagine that pleasure, desire, and my relationship to my own body might also develop differently in an aquatic environment.

In the summer of 2019, I started working on a film called ruses and refusals that featured several “anti-portraits,” including one of the nereid Thetis. The film represented her by three bearded beating cuttlefish hearts (friends painted blue). One heart says to another: —I was told that the way I was describing being in water sounded erotic—Oh yes—said the other—You’re right.

It was perhaps the same summer that I began floating as a kind of methodology. In floating, gravity is obviously still at play, but it makes me feel a stronger surrender to other agents too. I yield to the tide and so the sun, the moon, and the position and orientation of the earth, the friction of the wind on the surface, the weather, the salinity of the water, and I negotiate with my body, with my digestive status, my breath, my fatigue.

Verticality had also been a previous interest via Georges Bataille’s essay “Big Toe,” in which he lightly proposes the largest toe as the most “human” part of the body. He argues that it is the most differentiated from the anthropoid ape, and by being free from holding branches and climbing, has allowed the human to raise “himself straight up in the air like a tree, and all the more beautiful for the correctness of his erection. In addition, the function of the human foot consists in giving a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud…” I made a performance that took seriously his claim, proposing the two-toed or even the three-toed sloth as super-human.

I reference your notion of “terrestrial bias” for the first time in relation to the floaters who arrive wearing flounder costumes. The flounder is a recurring character in my films and is also one of my favorite fish—I see flounders often here in Marseille. I’m sure you know, but the fish is born with its body upright, vertical. As the fish matures, the body “falls” 90 degrees until it is parallel with the sea-floor. The bottom eye slowly moves from its “bottom” side, and “migrates” to the top side. I aspire to this kind of flexibility of perception and like to imagine how I might read differently if my eyes could travel.

MJ: That’s great—the eye that migrates through the body to appear on the topside! I am also quite partial to the honeycomb cowfish, which has this beautifully geometric face. Though not quite as dramatic as the flounder, it does challenge the conventions of frontality that may feel normal in human photography, since its face is difficult to capture in one flat plane.

I also loved the moment where you hold up the cover of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves to the horizon, matching its paper ocean horizon to the shifting waters. But you also play with glass orbs and mirrors to invert the ocean horizon, or the viewer’s normative orientation. At one point you talk about being “untethered” to the coast. How was drifting important for your film?

MB: Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves is incredible. I’m such a fan. The story is told in the form of six soliloquies, by the six central characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Characters are both themselves and the five others all at once and I have been thinking about that kind of subjectivity as one that floats, or perhaps drifts, leaks, is easily distracted, wanders, goes astray—or at least confounds its own boundaries. I used a citation from the book that I think pinpoints this kind of collective singular subject: Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming and assures me that I know them before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. As they approach, I become not myself but myself mixed with somebody.

I’d like to think that I am always myself mixed with somebody, or something, or somewhere. But this feels much more tangible when I am floating. Floating, drifting, and being untethered might also be a way of opening, yielding, or attempting to resist some of the structures we are tied too.

Since my Masters, I have been fascinated by the Ancient Greek verbal category called the middle voice. It is used to describe verbs that are neither active nor passive, or both at once. Floating is in this way an active passivity—there is intention and effort involved in allowing yourself to get carried away. 

MJ: I also learned about the middle voice in graduate school! It’s wild. Or rather, it shouldn’t be, but it offers another way of describing agency that feels more adequate to something like floating, or perhaps the growth of plants. There’s something called a “drift dive” in scuba diving, where you allow the current to carry you forward, and the boat will pick you up at a later spot. This experience of getting carried away is also effortful—one is not always graceful in adopting a posture to ride out the force of a current!

The fouled compass has an amazing attention to costuming, from the lavish, powdered, French aristocratic makeup of the Gatekeepers to the pastel, nearly camouflaged and demure dress of the Floaters. The Gatekeepers, by the way, were superb—I actually burst out laughing, and had such a visceral reaction to them as a kind of academic elite. This really came through for me when they start laughing, looking at each other for confirmation to keep laughing, and then the middle Gatekeeper with the false eyelashes around her lips says, “It’s a no, for me. [Silence].” That’s textbook rejection of the oceanic. How did you coach the Gatekeepers on getting into character, and how were you thinking about costuming choices and textures?

MB: The three of us all costumed ourselves. I gave a vague overall prompt of the vibe and then we all went for it. Silvia Romanelli, the middle Gate-keeper, is an absolutely fantastic costumer and someone I have worked with before, and Marie Boudet, on the right, is an amazing artist who was working with me for a month last summer. I introduced a few “tasks,” like laughing, Simon Cowelling and spitting pearls. Then each of us came up with a song that the other two did not know but nonetheless tried to sing along to. We improvised, tuned into each other, developed our characters on the fly, and had fun. I have to admit that I am usually not the most strategic maker. I am not being self-deprecating here: I like the idea that things can emerge from backstage or the wings, and maybe circumnavigate the schooled traditions of thought that I am subject to. A review once described my methodology as associative, which, Freud aside, I think resonates: likeness and sympathy can be found outside language and theory. Here especially, I tried to “follow the work.” Of course I had a text that pre-existed the imagery, but it was re-edited alongside and in response to the images and sounds that emerged. Similarly, I filmed new material, whilst also using older footage: The five pastel figures that fall into the water, for example, belong to some footage that I took in 2016 but never used until the fouled compass called for it.

MJ: So I have this theory—and we’ll see what you think—about sequins. I couldn’t help but notice, during the long-shot where the Gatekeepers each spit out fake pearls, that there is a large piece of blue sequined fabric hanging from the wall. Later in the film, two Floaters are wearing different colors of sequined clothing as they lay on their backs, bobbing in the water. Was the sequined fabric a kind of aquatic trophy for the Gatekeepers? Are they extracting oceanic materials?

MB: Ha! I like that idea. Sequins have a close resemblance to fish-scales. In the same way that tiger skins, rabbit fur, fox tails or leathers might be trophyesque, the sequins could definitely symbolize this. In reality though, I think I am drawn to sequins and iridescent shimmers as they’re not flat and play tricks on my eyes. With the Gatekeepers, I just wanted to create a feeling of opulence with the things that were already in my studio (a prime example of non-strategic slap-dashery, or more generously, “intuitive”). With the two Floaters, the sequins felt oceanic, and some of these dazzling surfaces might act as an armor, or mirrored protection from really being seen (maybe like disruptive cuttlefish camouflage)—diffracting images and diverting the gaze. The sequins aren’t unlike the 3D digital human characters, who have floral wallpaper designs mapped onto their skin, or a second skin, like a snake, that can be shed.

MJ: That connection between fishscales and snakeskin (also scaled) makes a lot of sense. Let’s talk about the color blue for a moment. I noticed you took up one moment in my book where I quote Jacques Cousteau’s attempt to describe the color blue while high (experiencing nitrogen narcosis, or rapture of the deep). He just can’t decide on the right name for the blue he was experiencing. Then there’s a moment in the film where you reflect on ancient names for blue, against the backdrop of shots of tangled fishing rope—such a terrestrial figuration. Could you say more about the significance of this pairing? Is blueness a slippery fish?

MB: I love this question. In the fouled compass, the narrator says: I prefer my characters like flashing fish in the sea slipping through fingers and maybe cutting palms as caution against snatching.
I read that Homer never mentions the word blue in the Odyssey—he uses wine-dark, amongst other descriptors. Yes, he was a poet etc, etc... But a philologist, Lazarus Geigner, found that “blue” was AWOL in many of the ancient texts: Hindu Vedic hymns, the Koran, Indian epics, the Bible in Hebrew, Assyrian texts, Icelandic sagas, and ancient Chinese stories. Further, the chronology in which names of colours were introduced into languages, after black and white, follows some standards: red is always the first colour, and blue is always the last. So I was imagining blue, exactly as you said—a slippery fish that didn’t want to settle or get caught in a name: unstable and shifting. So, when I read this excerpt of Cousteau in your book, it was an associative moment of YES! Blue escapes again! Aloof blue.
I also close the work with the repetition of “out of the blue,” for its relation to something unexpected, unforeseen. The blue (the sky or the sea) as an unexpected space or the source of unexpected events might be a friend of a fouled compass.

MJ: “Blue escapes again!” would be an amazing title for something! My book title, Wild Blue Media, was also playing with associations of “wild blue yonder” and blue as a kind of horizon of possibility, or the beyond.

Could you talk about the production process, and your experience working with actors? For me as a viewer, it looked like everyone was having a lot of fun—the moment when the Floaters “dive” (sideways flop) into the ocean in sequence, the man told to take his energy level down before serenading the sea in his underwear and a top hat. Were there unscripted moments that made the final cut?

MB: Yes, definitely. 
This work includes footage from many different moments over the last five years. From Awabakal country (Newcastle, Australia) in 2016 where I did a residency, to footage on Frioul here in Marseille with a friend, Tilly Webber, and more recently the glitzy Floaters and the scene with Romain Rolland. The work is equally scripted and unscripted. I like to assemble the ingredients from which to improvise: a set and costumes, some instruments or text, for example.

The script emerged from keeping a diary after floating, a chaotic collection of notes in my phone, and from reading. At the time, I was also researching for a computer game I intended to (and eventually will) make. I was trying to imagine a purple-watery-elsewhere-world with different geographical locations, each requiring different ways of reading/approaching: an attraction park (distraction, flighty reading), footnote forest (reading marginalia, or only from your blind spot), oracle alley (predictive reading—projecting), whirlpool way (nonlinear reading), glitch city (fragmented or non-functional reading). The work was associated with a residency with the videogame company Ubisoft, which was postponed and postponed with the pandemic. I was thinking about world building, maps, how to navigate, how to prevent “players” from arriving at any of the destinations, and using “joysticks”—with interest in both its sexual connotation but also how joy, movement and (dis)orientation might be woven. So the relationship to desire, teleology, and how we orient ourselves in relationships perhaps emerged here. Going back through my journal of that period now:

18th June 2020

“Marseille, on n’attend que vous”

A bird ate another bird. Big toes out. Pop belly. Swimming with guts of the bird. Beer propped in right shoe and shielded with shorts. Baignade interdite. Eye floaters make day light constellations in front of stars out there hidden behind sun veil.

I found another page where I had listed all of the terms and phrases that I had circled in The Waves: Hollowly, cover, immoral literature, trembling, a bruised day, quiver, trap door. Nothing staid, nothing settled. Gongs striking, clamour and boasting. Bubble. Tremulous. Agitated. I revenge myself upon the day. Entire world. Gape. Sluiced. Afloat. These words are in the fouled compass, I think, as other words and forms.

MJ: That’s fascinating, and a “diary of floating” is such an interesting challenge for trying to channel aquatic experiences into a narrative form that you already flagged as not arriving at something, and The Waves offers such a natural poetry for this.

One line that jumped out to me was, “I meant to write about death, but life came breaking in as usual.” I feel like so many oceanic imaginaries are precisely about imagining mortality: Shakespeare’s Tempest has the famous passage, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” about imagining a body transmuted into coral and pearls after a shipwreck. You also mention connections to Glissant, whose attention drifted to the bodies of stolen Africans cast overboard during the Middle Passage. Were there latent connections to the Black Atlantic in your film? For example, I was getting strong Drexciya vibes during one digital sequence of pixelated techno.

MB: Glissant is an important reference for me, though I can’t claim any expert scholarship. I think I will be reading his work for a long time. I began with The Poetics of Relation… my collective has been using it as a springboard for a reading group over the past two years. Most centrally, I am indebted to his ideas on opacity, and allowing the other the right to opacity and how that might inform relation. The anti-portraits that I mentioned earlier attempted to portray concealed characters, or conceal portrayed characters (the middle voice, again). I try not to explain them, recognize them, or define their edges: the characters perform their own refusal to perform, escape, play a trick, concoct a ruse, nip off stage for a drink break and never return. I hope that they remain opaque. Perhaps there is an ethics to this—trying to boycott homogenisation and taming, but more importantly to me, it is a way of orienting myself in language that faces towards what is unformulated, hidden, unsayable, and that cultivates a love before an object of love is delineated/explained/described/named. (The etymology of the Greek Apophasis is saying away).
I hope that the work is intransitive, that it doesn’t claim to possess or know anything, I don’t think there is a clear object to the film. My approach was initially from thinking sexual (dis)orientation, asexual and queer narrative structures of desire, difference, and where that intersects with post-colonial discourses—and my position within these.

I wanted the fouled compass to hold a non-teleological and fragmented narrative structure, avoiding the resolution of the heroic accomplishment, or a comfortable, cohesive “ending”: structures that are thickly slathered in hegemony, white supremacist and western colonial aspirations. Situating these questions within an oceanic environment, as you say, definitely makes a latent connection to the Black Atlantic. 
Most recently I came across Glissant’s idea of Trembling Thinking [la pensée du tremblement] in his book La Cohee du Lamentin, which unfortunately for my mediocre French, I have not yet found a translation of. I can’t be certain, but in the first pages he writes: trembling thinking arises from everywhere… it keeps us from thoughts of the system, and systems of thought. It does not absolve fear or the unresolved…
I imagine that Trembling Thinking has a tenuous tethering, drifts intentionally, and doesn’t pretend to be unaffected by the weather.
I like that you mention Drexciya, but to be honest, I hadn’t heard of them until very recently when two friends and fantastic artists, Dominique White and Lisa Vereertbrugghen, introduced them to me in relation to their work. I have not yet listened or delved into them—I will. I was interested in fragmenting and glitching the narrative voice as a way of cutting open language, to prevent words from sitting comfortably, or from full sentences reaching their goal.

MJ: Speaking of sound, I also noticed the patient moments where someone “plucks” the instrument of a lichen-covered branch, or an elongated succulent stem, like a cello. Jean Painlevé had similarly playful moments of working with sound and ocean creatures towards a similar effect—like a lobster’s antennae twitching in sync with a drum roll. Were there other moments of syncopation that were important to you?

MB: Jean Painlevé is another love of mine. Do you know his Neo-Zoological Drama? I have tried many times to memorize it, having very little idea what I am talking about. The twang of the branch is a sound that I made on what I call my “shonky harp.” It’s handmade and strung quite poorly, so that the notes are drastically unscaled. I use the same instrument for the part where Felipe slaps the water—this definitely follows a kind of un-metered rhythm and follows no time signature. The central soundtrack, on the other hand has a very even, metered progression to it. It more clearly has a feeling that it is moving somewhere… Though, I’m not sure it does. That vocal composition was influenced by Phillip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach… of course it is much simpler and more modest.

MJ: I’m not sure if I know that particular one, but I’m familiar with the Criteron Collection of Painlevé’s films, Science is Fiction, which didn’t make it to my book, but could have been a chapter! Just to end on an open note, how does the fouled compass connect to, build on, or depart from your previous films? What are you working on next? 

MB: Sometimes I think that my works are all the same. There is a clear sentiment between them. One of the first films I made, in 2013, was a go-pro documentation of myself sitting with a rock on my lap under water in an estuary— trying to defy the need to come up for air. I made a short work in 2015 about a Sovereign squid who escaped the names that she was given by eating them, and from 2017, a series of three performance lectures called “mollusk theory,” which followed firstly the cuttlefish, then the polycladida – marine flatworm (not technically a mollusk, but in this case, the flatworm stealthily snuck past the taxonomist), the limpet snail, and finally the mimic octopus. I have made a magazine to “close” that project, called Ten Tickles – My Fancy, (almost a double pun???) which I hope to have printed in the next month.

The anti-portraits (which, next to Thetis, focused on the blobfish, Buster Keaton, Julian of Norwich and Diogenes of Sinope) could all be floaters too. They are all close to my continued interest in legibility and illegibility, and how we read and make sense in a way that does not rob the source material of its agency. I think that this is a long-term (and necessarily unending) political project of how to situate, position, orient, and act in relation to others.

The video-game project I mentioned is still unfolding too—I’m learning a lot of new skills and have managed to “create” a “world” where a single figure C_template_female can walk, run, jump, and as yet be unaffected by the physical properties of water (casually walking along the seabed).

Most recently, I received a commission that allowed me to write and direct a long-form film. I am in the editing process right now. With 25 people in the team, it is by far the scariest and most ambitious project I have ever tried. It will be very different from my other works in its materiality: Robin Rutenberg, a fantastic composer, is making the music in place of my shonky harp, for example, and in place of a haphazardly placed zoom-recorder in the middle of a scene, I now understand what a “boom pole” and a “room tone” are. I worked with a lighting technician, too, Vera Martins, for the first time. The film is called BIOPIC (I think)… or perhaps CHARLES GENEVIÈVE LOUIS AUGUSTE ANDRÉ TIMOTHÉE, which, like the anti-portraits, is about not-being-about, and therefore somewhat about an 18th century French diplomat. Like the fouled compass, and the anti-portraits, I was thinking about storytelling, how to avoid capture and enclosure whilst maintaining a care and intimacy towards the subject.
A thread across my work that is articulated in BIOPIC, is my attention to taxonomy, naming and categorical practices: do I name myself, and take space and actualize? Or do I try to think of ways around being named? Do I participate in this linguistic practice and try to subvert/re-create/steal from it? Or do I try to imagine a world and a way of speaking entirely otherwise?
I would love to hear what you are up to Melody, and what your future plans are? Thanks so much for the questions, and so, so much for your incredible book Wild Blue Media.

MJ: Thanks for asking, and for your kind interest in my work! I’ll look forward to seeing BIOPIC in the future. On my end, I’ve just finished the proofs for a new edited co-edited collection I’m collaborating on with Rafico Ruiz called Saturation: An Elemental Politics, out with Duke Press in September. This collection of essays thinks through “saturation” as an alternative to object-centered analysis. Instead, we offer saturation as a way of thinking about situations where you might not know all the agencies/materialities in advance (such that you can name them), and that might evoke saturation in both literal and figurative senses (think about being cognitively saturated, or color saturation, or sonic saturation, among others).

I’m also working on a few other oceanic projects—one is a collaboration with Judit Hersko and Jules Jaffe called Mosaic Oceanography that examines the history of plankton sampling off of Scripps Pier at UC San Diego, as part of a Getty/Pacific Standard Time grant directed by Lisa Cartwright and Nan Renner.

My next book project is on seaweeds as media forms. There’s this great seaweed herbarium at my home campus (UC Santa Barbara) and it got me thinking about the connections between photography and seaweed photosynthesis, along with seaweed recipes, and seaweeds as these almost utopian sources of materials/energy that fit with sustainability goals.

Thank you for sharing your amazing film! It was a pleasure to dialogue with you.