Free-falling the water column : raptures and ruptures of the deep

Very few places provoke a sense of exploration and adventure like undersea does. As a frontier that remains as mysterious to humans as outer space, undersea worlds have a long association with extreme experiences. The threshold of this extreme comes into being at the point of immersion, disturbing the material realities of land where the body, mind and emotions become conjoined in ‘ new protocols of relating ’ (Pell 2012). Here, we discover a partially ‘ other self ’ that results from transgressing the familiarity of land for the deeply unfamiliar conditioning of life beneath the waves. Within this domain, very few practices engage with the transgressive properties of being undersea more than free diving. Supporting one of the most intimate relations with oceanic space, the free diver submits to a loose ‘ choreography ’ (Pickering 1999) of free fall in an ocean column. Testing the limits of human being undersea, without the technological assistance of SCUBA, divers rely instead upon negotiating an altered state, of blood gases, cardiac function and metabolism. These negotiations make free divers important sites for transforming medical knowledge, and also for transforming our sense of the relational core of being, thinking and feeling.