Surfing Arts, Science, and Issues Conference (SASIC) held at Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, California, in 2010. The conference was guest-organized by The Modeling Agency, a Los Angeles artist initiative founded by Nick Herman and Christopher James. This introduction presented the organizing themes of the conference—the aesthetics of surfing and modeling as an investigative strategy. A concurrent exhibition of relevant art was hung in the Center for Coastal Studies building on the Scripps Campus, amidst and among the trappings of Oceanographic research and its documentation. Further information may be found at: themodelingagency.net.

SASIC 9 offered presentations from both the worlds of science and art that considered what might make up what one could call the “aesthetics” of the surfing zone. Aesthetics can be variously defined, but for my purposes here, it is about how to derive meaning from form. What is the history of an object’s becoming? What are the forces involved, and how do they inhabit its materials? These concerns are something familiar to art criticism, but they are also a part of our fascination with ocean waves. Where do waves come from and how is it that they can seem to have an endless variety of type, mood, attitude, and manner? These, in fact, are precisely the questions of interest to oceanographers studying the origin and propagation of ocean waves.

However, perhaps because waves are natural phenomena and art is human made, the study of either falls into its own discrete discipline with its own methodologies of interpreting its subject.

This is what SASIC 9 was about: using the subject of surfing as a way to consider relationships between artistic and scientific inquiry, the methodologies they employ for the capture of knowledge, and the way the knowledge ultimately is used.