The Ocean as a Creative Experience: Architecture, Art, and Music

This book by artist, diver, and editor-in-chief of an underwater magazine Jürgen Claus is a milestone among the books dedicated to the planet sea. It is a knowledge-rich overview, created from facts and experiences, of three main themes that have never been described in context. Marine architectures from both the Pacific and Atlantic regions have now moved from vision to reality. Whether it is a sail-shaped architecture in Nouméa or a whale-shaped one in the Arctic region. Special attention is paid by Prof. Claus to post-disaster architecture. The book will encourage young readers to design metabolic buildings themselves.

That the seascape has also become a fluid studio for visual artists may come as a surprise. The works of art, some of which the author has experienced first-hand, have intertwined with an ecological, sustainable way of working. And this is also true to a special degree for the sound artists. They realize their sonic worlds with recordings from the sounding world underwater, a concert hall of hitherto unknown dimensions. The author’s experience as a professor of media art with students flows into the description of multimedia or media-related ocean installations. Here the book becomes a stimulus for realizing one’s own experiences.

Jürgen Claus lives and works in Aachen (Germany) and Baelen (Belgium). He studied theater, art history and philosophy at LMU University in Munich, Germany. Claus was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a professor of media art at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne, Germany. His work includes paintings, films, light, solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, whose theoretical works have sold over 100,000 copies. Jürgen Claus is the first to look at the ocean not from the point of view of a scientist, but from that of an artist, writes Michel Ragon. In his book, Claus combines professional experience as an inventor of fascinating underwater artworks and films, as editor-in-chief of a diving magazine, with a wide-ranging field of novel marine architectures, marine art and sound worlds in the oceans. The ocean architect Jacques Rougerie characterized him as follows: You were one of the very first to believe in arts under the sea and above all to develop them. Today, this is becoming a reality. You are a true visionary for me.