More-than-human Communication

Can we understand the intentions of non-humans?

Eels have a range of senses that coincides with the signals of human disasters. It might not be only humans who perceived the crisis of eels, but also eels that felt the catastrophes of humans. Eels can hear sounds of very low frequency, lower than 20 Hz, which are referred to as infrasound. Infrasound emits from sources with enormous energy, such as sonic booms, nuclear and chemical explosions, and diesel engines. Likewise, the range of electromagnetic waves that eels can perceive includes the frequency of military submarine communication and emergency radio. The ocean, where eels are born and die, has been getting increasingly full of human-made debris, providing more materials than ever for eels to experience the material culture of humans. The realization that humans aren’t the only beings with subjectivity, who can make observations and ask questions, inspired me to come up with a fictional supposition: Since humans have long been inquisitive about how eels have sex, eels have also questioned how humans have sex. If so, then how does an eel imagine the sexual intercourses of humans? The speculations of an eel are inseparable from its perspective formed by lifelong migration and metamorphosis. The human way of living, interpreted from an eel-centric standpoint, might not align with what you experience as a human. An eel thus cognitively reconstructs, in other words, queers, the human world by misunderstanding our reproductive life cycle.