Scientists reflect on the experience of ‘blindness’ in regard to the unknown and assimilate their experience in forms of texts and images in very different ways. Questions of visualisation are highly important for research practice. When William Beebe, protected by a 1,50 diameter ball, the bathysphere, in 1934 turns out to be the first to reach a depth of 923 meters, he suffers from a glaring ‘visual defect’. The images of the deep-sea world produced according to his indications mirror the ambivalent process of forming representation, which gradually assimilates maritime life to the requirements of scientific research practice.

Based on the Beebe example, I would like to speak about the specificity of submarine knowledge space and the change of visualisation styles of deep-sea creatures. Every epistemic space is without doubt the result of constructive processes, but the sea especially increases the ‘blind spots’ of scientific practice: we are dealing with an extrahuman area which we can only access with help of technologies and media – a fact already mentioned by Keith Benson, Helen Rozwadowski and David van Keuren in their very important book on oceanographic research, “The Machine in Neptune’s Garden” (2004). Accordingly, images of or from the depth of the sea are by definition effective images, but they also produce knowledge that would not exist without the above-mentioned media based visual process.