Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, and Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World.

Foreword / Daniel R. Reichman and Robert J. Foster ix
Preliminary. Forward and Back xiii
Preface. Wave Clutter xv
Introduction. Significant Waves 1
1. From the Waterwolf to the Sand Motor: Domesticating Waves in the Netherlands 31
Set One
First Wave: The Genders of Waves 71
Second Wave: Venice Hologram 79
Third Wave: Wave Navigation, Sea of Islands 83
2. Flipping the Ship: Oriented Knowledge, Media, and Waves in the Field, Scripps Institution of Oceanography 91
Set Two
First Wave: Being the Wave 141
Second Wave: Radio Ocean 148
Third Wave: Gravitational Waves, Sounded 154
3. Waves to Order and Disorder: Making and Breaking Scale Models inside and outside the Lab, from Oregon to Japan 159
Set Three
First Wave: Massive Movie Waves 192
Second Wave: Hokusai Now 203
Third Wave: Blood, Waves 208
4. World Wide Waves, In Silico: Computer Memory, Ocean Memory, and Version Control in the Global Data Stack 211
Set Four
First Wave: Middle Passages 242
Second Wave: Wave Power 250
Third Wave: Wave Theory ~ Social Theory 257
5. Wave Theory, Southern Theory: Disorienting Planetary Oceanic Futures, Indian Ocean 269
Postface. The Ends of Waves 301
Acknowledgments 305
Notes 311
References 339
Index 389