SUNK COSTS at Ars Electronica 2026: Fluid Media

SUNK COSTS: The Saga of the Felicity Ace will be presented at Ars Electronica Festival 2026 in Linz as part of “Fluid Media,” a panel within the S+T+ARTS AQUA MOTION conference programme Negotiating with Water. The panel brings together Jamie Allen, Ioana Vreme Moser, and Robertina Šebjanič, moderated by Ana-Maria Carabelea, to consider water as a medium that senses, records, stores, and transmits information about military, logistical, industrial, and commercial activity.

SUNK COSTS takes the 2022 fire and sinking of the roll-on/roll-off vehicle carrier Felicity Ace near the Azores as a point of departure for investigating the hidden infrastructures of global logistics and their ecological, legal, and cultural afterlives. Carrying nearly 4,000 vehicles, the ship burned for almost two weeks before sinking to approximately 3,000 metres in the Atlantic. The project follows the vessel across different states of value and legibility: ship, cargo system, disaster, insured loss, wreck, pollution risk, deep-sea object, and potential cultural archive.

At Ars Electronica, Allen will discuss how submerged evidence complicates terrestrial ways of seeing and governing infrastructure. Once a logistical object disappears beneath the ocean surface, its material life continues even as familiar regimes of visibility, accounting, ownership, and responsibility begin to fragment. The presentation forms part of the ongoing development of SUNK COSTS through PartArt4OW, extending the project’s artistic and participatory research into questions of ocean literacy, wreckage, salvage, maritime responsibility, and the deep sea as an archive of global capitalism.

Event: Ars Electronica Festival 2026 — Negotiating Humanity
Conference programme: Negotiating with Water
Panel: Fluid Media
Date: Sunday, September 13, 2026
Time: 12:30–13:15
Location: Ursulinenhof Linz, Landstraße 31, 4020 Linz, Austria
Participants: Ioana Vreme Moser · Robertina Šebjanič · Jamie Allen
Moderator: Ana-Maria Carabelea

The panel asks how treating water as a medium carrying messages about hydro-social relations might change those relations. It considers artistic practices that surface stories of humanity’s use and abuse of water, including chemical weapons on the ocean floor, sunken logistics infrastructures, and toxic traces of industrial activity.