«A manganese nodule grows over millions of years at the bottom of the sea, for example around fossil shark teeth which sank to depths of 3,000-5,000 meters in the Pacific ocean. These nodules contain precious metals such as cobalt, copper, zinc, manganese and nickel as well as rare earth oxides. These raw materials we now call resources, are in high demand for ‹green› or ‹intelligent› technologies and functionalized in Janis Polar’s electronic devices his artworks depends on.

The multi-media installation «mangan gardens» is based on longterm research and artistically investigates early and present day deep-sea mining explorations that seek to colonise the bottom of the Pacific ocean and extract these manganese nodules for commercial purposes. In «mangan gardens» Janis Polar takes both a historical and speculative approach, exploring disturbed deep sea environments and complexly entangled socio-ecologies through the juxtaposition of different media, archives, found objects and sounds. The work builds a connection between 1970s extraction experiments and today’s renewed large scale advancements to mine in the Pacific ocean, through the use of: images from the archives of GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research and the The Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in German; authentic manganese nodules and found objects from 1970s. How do the stories of the deep sea that have ‹washed up› on the surface shape a visual culture and media aesthetic of the seabed, a dark place without light that was barely visible in the 1970s and is highly visible with today's media technology? Today, images and sounds of deep sea mining explorations are largely absent. «mangan gardens» imagines them speculatively via the metaphor of the monster, writing its own visual (hi)story of an uncanny technosphere and possible more-than-human perspectives.