In a famous essay from 1989, Jeff Wall argued that predigital photography was premised on liquid intelligence. This “sense of immersion in the incalculable” had a deep history, an ancestry present in darkroom photography as “a memory-trace of very ancient production processes—of washing, bleaching, dissolving and so on.” Yet even as he surveyed this technical genealogy, Wall also pondered the future of liquid intelligence—especially as it applied to the craft of photography at the then-dawning of a new digital age. And in his final paragraphs, Wall looked to the distant horizons imagined by Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi epic from 1972. Most of the film takes place far from Earth, on a space station orbiting an oceanic planet. But that planet—Solaris—is not simply an object of investigation for human scientists. Solaris itself is alive, a literally liquid intelligence studying the scientists studying it.

Five centuries ago, a more literal kind of liquid intelligence—the arts of long-distance navigation—fundamentally changed our own planet. Unprecedented global networks emerged from then-new technologies for immersion in the incalculable. Solaris multiply references this early modern era. Five paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder decorate the space station’s cabinet-of-curiosities library, which also holds a copy of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The film’s final scene stages Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son. But if Solaris connects early modernity to an imagined future, this article considers the challenges, now, in writing histories of early modern salt water.

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