<![CDATA[liquid archives - related essays]]>Wed, 04 Dec 2019 13:43:53 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Sisters of Ocean and Ice]]>Sun, 08 Sep 2019 20:31:37 GMThttp://www.liquidarchives.com/the-archives/sisters-of-ocean-and-iceOn the Hydro-feminism of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana’s Rise: From One Island to Another
SHIMA (October 2019)

The full essay is now available on SHIMA: HERE.

“Sister of ice and snow, I’m coming to you ... Sister of ocean and sand, I welcome you.” This opening line from the video poem Rise: From One Island to Another, disseminated through the environmental activist organisation 350.org’s social media platform,1 invokes an Indigenous transoceanic solidarity between Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Inuk poet Aka Niviana from Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland. As the camera captures Jetnil-Kijiner standing in water just off the shores of Majuro island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and offers soaring views of Niviana walking on the melting icecaps of Greenland, the poets’ woven spoken-word performances reference the climate relationships between sea inundation and ice melt on their respective islands. While the imagery of the video lends itself to exoticised tropes of islands and islanders as disappearing (Farbotko, 2010; Korber, 2017: 158), the poets speak otherwise. In many cases, the imagery offers the poets a strong foil against which to assert a sisterhood of ocean and ice. In what follows I ask what the importance of claiming a sisterhood of ocean and ice—what I will articulate as a feminist hydro-ontological imaginary (Te Punga Somerville, 2012; Neimanis, 2017; Harris, 2015)— might be, especially in response to the global transformations of the climate and climate representation.

Funded and launched by 350.org, Rise was part of the larger Rise for the Climate campaign that sought to mobilise a climate justice movement worldwide—820 actions in 91 countries. With video campaigns, protests, and other actions orchestrated around the world in September 2018 culminating in the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, it marked a new visibility for a global climate justice perspective: to bring “frontline” communities (350.org) together around the world with a specific demand for leadership to keep carbon in the ground and work toward a fossil free-economy. In recent years, 350.org has created viral social media campaigns to bridge transnational environmentalism and grassroots activism, striving to develop forms of belonging in an era of globalisation. As such, it is an “eco-cosmopolitan” (Heise, 2008) platform that at times essentialises specific local environmental concerns, plays into exoticising tropes of those “frontline” communities, while at the same time enabling connections across translocal groups. This dynamic is evident in the making of Rise.

Since 2014, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner has been a leading figure in representing Pacific island states fighting for climate justice. She was selected to speak at the 2014 opening ceremony of the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Summit and again asked to speak at the Conference of Parties (COP) 21 in Paris in 2015. Her visibility on these NGO platforms is partly due to her position in the Marshall Islands—as the daughter of politician Dr Hilda Heine (currently the first woman president of the Republic of the Marshall Islands), as an emerging poet and artist publishing and exhibiting in English-speaking venues, and as co- founder of the non-profit Jo-Jikum, dedicated to empowering the voices of Marshallese youth to seek climate justice. In 2015, she was highlighted as a female “climate warrior,” in Vogue magazine (Russell, 2015). The tensions between recognition and exotification present in these frameworks led her in 2017 to begin developing spoken word performances that would reclaim the racialised and gendered perception of female “climate warriors.” As part of a Smithsonian arts and culture summit in Honolulu in 2017, she and three other Pacific women developed a spoken word performance that highlighted the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on representations of Pacific women.

For Jetnil-Kijiner, the Rise campaign for 350.org, coordinated with a number of Pacific Pawa group actions across the Pacific, offered another complicated opportunity to cultivate solidarity beyond borders (Jetnī l-Kijiner, 2018). The poet first travelled with seventeen other Pacific Climate Warriors to Germany in order to submit a petition to stop its coal mining operations (ibid). Recognising Jetnil-Kijiner’s regional climate justice work and international reputation, Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, asked her to participate in making a video poem about climate change that would be featured as part of the global Rise social media campaign. He invited Jetnil-Kijiner to visit the melting glacial waters of Greenland with him and glaciologist Jason Box. Before making the trip with McKibben and Box, and most likely understanding how her identity position would be framed, Jetnil-Kijiner asked to be put in touch with an Inuit poet sharing her concerns. Box introduced Jetnil-Kijiner to Aka Niviana, a young poet whom he had met at a Copenhagen climate protest. Niviana, part of an artist activist movement addressing colonial legacies in Greenland, had been making poems that specifically addressed the current debates about resource extraction as part of that colonial legacy (Niviana 2018). Her views resonated with Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s interest in parallel colonial continuities on RMI.

Having been brought together through this transnational framework to fight for a “fossil- free” economy, and very aware of how their positions as Indigenous women might be used to frame the issues of climate change, Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviâna created a poem that could address the legacies of colonialism, while at the same time, negotiate the politics and imagery of contemporary climate representation with their performance and voice. In other words, they sought to find agency in what has often been called the double-bind of the artist-as- ethnographer (Foster, 1995; Fisher, 1996), when non-white artists, asked to speak for and about one’s culture on global platforms, have a new visibility, but also a newly objectified position. In this essay I will address how the poets strategically use their positionalities within eco-cosmopolitan spaces of representation like 350.org in order to critique not only the continuity between colonial and neo-liberal operations (Gomez-Barris, 2017; Shiva, 2002; Goodyear-Ka‘opua, 2012), but also the continuity between colonial and environmental scopic regimes (DeLoughrey, 2019; Demos, 2016). I will discuss how the poets organise their poetic addresses, first toward each other, and then toward multiple audiences in ways that build toward moments of self-conscious intervention in the environmental tropes of crisis, disaster, and  nostalgia.

Beyond identifying the poets’ critical interventions, I will also discuss how their feminist hydro-ontological perspective—of ocean and ice—strategically connects their struggles and offers an immersive space for complexifying climate representation and imagining future possibility (Yussoff and Gabrys, 2001). In this respect, I see their feminist hydro-ontologies engaging in relational Island Studies’ turn toward the global climate (Pugh, 2018). In his recent assessment of relational island studies in the Anthropocene, Jonathan Pugh argues for an understanding of the relative nature of island vulnerabilities and the politics of resiliency in the overlapping temporalities of climate change (ibid; see also Kelman, 2018; Kelman and Weichselgartner, 2015). Indeed, the geopolitical comparisons between Greenland and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) are exemplary here. Although they are both often used as iconic island tropes at the forefront of the climate imaginary (DeLoughrey, 2019; Ziser and Sze, 2007; Korber, 2017; Schneider and Nocke, 2007), they have differing stakes in climate justice discussions. RMI currently faces regular flooding, water shortages, and continued nuclear contamination issues from US atomic testing during the Cold War. Its status as a COFA (Compact of Free Association) treaty state, still in many ways tied to the US, also informs official discourses of adaptation and mitigation. In recent years, discussions of climate migration have met with resistance (Rudiak-Gould, 2013; Burkett, 2014) and new discussions are centered around NGO-sponsored engineering and land reclamation projects to raise the archipelago’s infrastructure and even build new islands (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2019). Greenland’s government, facing rapid ice melt, thawing permafrost and increased navigability of Arctic waters, is considering how to manage its natural resources (over which it gained sovereignty under the 2009 Self Government Act), especially oil and uranium (Markussen, 2017: 306). With multinational companies and foreign governments seeking mining opportunities in Greenland, the government is considering how to responsibly manage these resources in a way that balances economic growth (which would strengthen its sovereignty in relation to Denmark), consideration for Greenlandic traditional ways of life (Rud, 2017: 135), and climate change mitigation. These are necessarily broad-brush overviews, but they begin to explain nuanced relations and attitudes toward conversations about global carbon emissions policies in climate change and climate justice across islands and oceans.

I’m interested in the ways that Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana, as artists working to create new imaginaries about climate change in relation to their islands and beyond, bring the issues back to feminist embodied relationships with and through water. Figuring their bodies as part of the rising water, not victims of it, their “feminism without borders” (Mohanty 2003, 1) offers an alternative to climate discussions that still operate within implicit capitalist, nationalist, and power-elite frameworks (Bond and Dorsey, 2010; Adamson et al, 2002). The poets do not claim to speak for all of the constituents of their respective island homes, but instead perform direct conversation (in the form of poetic address) with each other so as to break open hegemonic discourses. To summarise the implicit arc of their concern, which I will unfold in more detail below: the problem of climate change is not (simply) inundation by or the melting of water, but their “submersion” (Gomez-Barris 2017) and invisibility (Simmons 2019; Tall Bear 2014) in colonial-capital processes—histories of empire that have already impacted and continue to impact their particular geographies, societies, and imaginaries that now also ripple through discourses of green capitalism (Harcourt and Nelson, 2015; Whyte, 2017) and carbon trading (Liverman 2009), and that do not fully acknowledge the uneven distribution of risks and benefits for their communities. As a further concern, they have to attend to the ways that eco-cosmopolitanism frames their claims to visibility. An Indigenous feminist embodied performativity of rising becomes key to negotiating these various discursive and scopic frameworks. I will articulate this in terms of an hydro-ontology by way of extending island studies frameworks of the aquapelagic—the assemblage of human interactivity with sea, land, and sky (Hayward, 2012)—to include new discussions of materialist hydro-feminisms and feminist solidarity.

full article coming soon...

<![CDATA[Liquidity Incorporated]]>Sun, 08 Sep 2019 20:20:38 GMThttp://www.liquidarchives.com/the-archives/liquidity-incorporatedEconomic Tides and Fluid Data in Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc.

Christina Gerhardt
and Jaimey Hamilton Faris
in Make Waves (ed. Paula Farca) U of Nevada Press, 2019

INTRODUCTION (for full essay go to academia.edu)
You must be shapeless, formless, like water.

--Bruce Lee

There are reasons to consider “fluidity” or “liquidity” as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity.
--Bauman (2)

Water is the lifeblood of human survival, liquidity is fundamental to corporate vitality.
--J. P. Morgan

Liquidity connects to and expresses our most cataclysmic contem- porary crises: be they financial asset fluctuations or climate-change- induced sea level rises. Through metaphors of water, filmmaker, artist, and essayist Hito Steyerl’s large-scale 30-minute video installation Liquidity Inc. (2014) connects topics such as late capitalism, precarious labor, climate change, and data circulation. In particular, Liquidity Inc. thematizes the economic tides after the financial crisis of 2008. The first epigraph above, quoting Bruce Lee on water, opens the video and appears as a refrain throughout the installation. Spoken over recurring images of waves, diagrams of liquid assets, storm systems, and other idiosyncratic visuals of water, the video offers a renewed engagement with Lee’s statement. What does it mean to be water, especially in the twenty-first century?

This essay examines the literal and metaphorical use of the concept of water in Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc., focusing on the following four concerns. First, water, like the installation’s very title, obviously puts forward the economic notion of liquidity, that is, the degree to which a financial asset can be accessed or brought onto the market; and the fluidity associated with financial transactions. Second, in the contem- porary economic world of fluid and ever-changing labor conditions, individuals swim in the fluctuating waters of economic tides and need to be flexible to flow in the river of capital. Thus, the video engages liquidity as an articulation of precarious labor. Third, the video considers water as weather. It discusses water as climate change–induced tsu- namis, as clouds, as torrents, as rain, as storm, and as flood. Reporters in balaclavas, invoking the Weather Underground but with a contem- porary climate change and computer cloud referencing twist, also ap- pear.1 Fourth, Steyerl attempts to engage the liquid circulation of data, of information production and dissemination, of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and of animation.

These four concerns are clear in retrospect, but the rhythm and sequencing of the video itself mixes them all together like a brewing storm in the ocean: segments are intercut in faster and faster waves, crashing down on other segments; frames generate within frames. By the video’s end, the viewer is awash in sounds and images of water, building the perception that a particular message does not need to be understood by the viewer, but rather a virtual superstorm of clichés about liquidity needs to be felt and absorbed. Steyerl’s work, here and elsewhere, is intentionally nonlinear and playful in her engagement of key issues in contemporary politics, economics, environmental stud- ies and informatics. Her keen attention to recurring deployments of water aims to expose how the poetic coincidence of “liquidity” across domains might actually operate as a veil for the integration, implementation, and catastrophic consequences of neoliberal power. Ultimately, this essay seeks to articulate the video’s claims that politics, economics, environment, and informatics now flow through each other and thus must be read together.

Liquidity Inc. opens with what seems at first to be fairly straight- forward exploration of economic liquidity learned through the lessons of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Its first main sequence features a TV magazine–style story about Jacob Wood, a Vietnamese American stockbroker-cum-martial-artist. Wood is an empathetic protagonist who had been working for Lehman Brothers at the time of the stock market crash of 2008. For the camera, he retraces the day he lost his job, how he felt, as well as his efforts to rebound by making a living as a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter and announcer. Wood’s explanation, replete with Bruce Lee’s watery metaphors about learning to adapt gracefully, seems to minimize and naturalize Lehman Brothers’ role in the financial crisis. In the video, Wood looks to the camera and says:

There were purges every year because of the economy. Especially large financial companies have had a lot of pressure, for more earnings, for their stock price to increase, and so it’s normal, kind of purging every year to lay off a certain amount of people. That’s why you’ve got to position yourself to be defensive, to be ready for those shocks . . . to have a shockproof portfolio. You’ve got to adapt to whatever is happening in the market . . . You’ve got to adapt to your situation. It’s very fluid. It’s kind of like fighting.

As Wood describes the pressuring and purging forces of the economy, questions arise for the viewer. How is it that Wood (despite hard-hitting exposés like Inside Job, 2010) does not blame particular people, corpo- rations, or governments for his financial straits? How is it that Wood even empathizes with Lehman Brothers because it was under “pressure” to perform? As the video repeats his words along with pictures of storms and water, it cultivates sensitivity toward and curiosity about how the economy is naturalized through water metaphors.

To understand the context for Wood’s point of view, it is instructive to review how watery metaphors emerged in economic thinking in the first place. The notion of the economy acting like a liquid “under pressure” has its origins in the seventeenth century, when new discoveries of hydraulic power and blood circulation were at the forefront of technological, political, and economic thought. Blaise Pascal and others described how the pneumatic properties of water multiply force and William Harvey revolutionized medicine when he described the human pulmonary system as hydraulic--blood pumping both away from and back to the heart in a ceaseless and elegant cycle (Harvey 48). Economic and political thinkers of the day quickly seized upon these paradigms. Thomas Hobbes, for ex- ample, made it a key theme of his 1651 treatise Leviathan:

Money . . . goes round about, nourishing, as it passeth, every part thereof; in so much as this concoction is, as it were, the sanguification of the Commonwealth: for natural blood is in like manner made of the fruits of the earth; and, circulating, nourisheth by the way every member of the body of man. (118)

As scholar Kath Weston argues in “Lifeblood, Liquidity, and Cash Transfusions,” metaphors of circulation and flow gained momentum when Adam Smith wrote in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations about “the free circulation of labor and stock, both from employment to employ- ment and from place to place” (57). Indeed, the concept of circulation undergirded the whole of Smith’s argument--that the natural and auto- matic forces of the free market should be able to self-regulate.

Recurring motifs of economic circulation were broadened by the literal link between water and wealth in the Age of Empire. The health of nation-states depended not only on rain, irrigation, and riverside mills but also on rivers, canals, ports, and transoceanic crossings of a far-flung trade system. Water became a primary metaphor for the “natural” state of the economy. Yet, despite the seeming fluidity of the world trade system represented by Smith, a need already existed in the early years of the stock market to establish mechanisms by which money could be shifted from one account to another and hence used to hide and absorb over-extended investment and debt.2 Two centuries later, John Maynard Keynes was the first to use the term “liquidity” in a scathing critique of such practices. In his 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes argued:

Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive vir- tue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of “liquid” securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the commu- nity as a whole . . . The actual, private object of the most skilled investment today is “to beat the gun,” as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreci- ating, half-crown to the other fellow. (155)

Reflecting on the lessons of the Great Depression, Keynes insisted that liquidity was really a shell game played by investment institutions and that ultimately, it was usually the citizen and community who bore the brunt of speculation. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, the orthodoxies of liquidity have come to dominate the computerized probability-driven system of futures trading and hedge funds. As J. P. Morgan asserts in its marketing brochures, “Water is the lifeblood of human survival, liquidity is fundamental to corporate vitality.” It celebrates the power of the corporation to concentrate global cash flow and further claims that “web technology enables active, automated liquidity and investment management.”3 Yet the average consumer’s confidence in these seemingly fluid and automated systems, as many have argued, actually hid the calculated activities of firms like Lehman Brothers, who knowingly bundled subprime mortgages that led to the 2008 crash (Langley; Pasanek and Polillo). As this brief overview shows, the laws of hydro-physics do not govern economics: economics has simply drawn on its language.

Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. emphasizes the confusing build up of liquid and water metaphors in Wood’s language by pairing them with visual montages of CGI waves, water drops, texts referencing water, clouds, tsunamis, and more. As these images begin to break up the narrative, they also challenge the viewer’s understanding of the 2008 financial crisis and of Wood’s interpretation of it. The video’s approach is both radical and subtle in that it eschews an exploration of the cause and effect of the crisis (as other documentaries have done) for an exploration of the persistent metaphoric and affective use of “liquidity.” This visual strategy of exaggerating the simple juxtaposition of economic operations to the natural pressure systems of waves comments on how the notion of the economy as a “natural” ecology of water is instrumentalized throughout the cultural sphere, used, in effect, to displace and disguise the human forces at work.

Steyerl also brings home this point narratively at the very end of the opening documentary sequence by also inserting some found foot- age of a folksy-looking nineties financial advisor wearing a cream col- ored turtleneck who explains the virtues of liquidity for the individual investor. This short clip plays in a box at the upper right corner of a larger screen in which Wood spars with another fighter. The expert investor’s voice is privileged while Wood fights silently. In the clip, the investor explains how simple it is to convert certain assets (a home mortgage or stocks) quickly into cash before, as he puts it, “financial disaster strikes.” This scene within a scene brings the contradictions of Wood’s situation to the fore. Even Wood, himself a stockbroker, did not have enough economic liquidity to avoid the market “shocks” of 2008. This reminds us of Keynes’s comment on “liquidity”--that there really is no such thing at the individual or community level. Even at the corporate level, Lehman Brothers did not escape bankruptcy. Still, if the construct has any applicability, it is for corporations who are “too big to fail” (like J. P. Morgan and Bear Stearns) and can rely either on huge global networks of cash flow or government tax-payer “bail outs.” Lacking financial liquidity, Wood’s only option is to “be fluid” in his changing work situation. ........ (see link above for full text)

<![CDATA[Leviathans]]>Wed, 27 Jul 2016 14:43:57 GMThttp://www.liquidarchives.com/the-archives/leviathans
Allan Sekula Fish Story
In his lecture "Waiting for Gaia," Bruno Latour establishes an oblique critique of the political figure of the leviathan.  He describes the breakdown of the fictional "we" in the current discussions  of climate change, arguing that the ideal political collective,  supposed to have vanquished the natural forces of chaos, violence, base instinct, has  actually constructed an even deeper chaotic force of climate change.  He says:

The human collective actor who is said to have committed the deed [of climate change ] is not a character that can be thought, sized up, or measured. You never meet him or her. It is not even the human race taken in toto, since the perpetrator is only a part of the human race, the rich and the wealthy, a group that have no definite shape, nor limit and certainly no political representation. How could it be “us” who did “all this” since there is no political, no moral, no thinking, no feeling body able to say “we” —and no one to proudly say “the buck stops here”?

I am interested in how Latour articulates this breakdown of the "we"–--when the political system of the sovereign state has failed us, when its political economic systemacity seems to have overtaken any notion of a body politic.  How did this happen and in what context?  In this essay I want to look at a few art pieces that might offer some answers to this question. 
Two important contemporary media projects address this new representation of the Leviathan (and its historical becoming) obliquely through the lens of Herman Melville’s narrative about the white whale, Moby Dick.
One of these is of course the highly influential photo essay, Fish Story by Allen Sekula,1989-1995, a foundational documentary/art photo essay on the global port and container system under deregulated capitalism, from the early nineties. The book documents the growing network of container ships and their ports,  seeking to create visibility around the dispersed and flowing aspects  of our economic system.  Another is a  more recent film from 2012, titled Leviathan made as part of an experimental program at Harvard in Critical Media Studies called the Sensory Ethnography Lab or SEL, which focuses on an industrial fishing vessel off the coast of the US eastern seaboard. These two fish stories use Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as an entry point into their aesthetic spaces and symbolic structures. But  might seem at first to be about fish and other sea creatures (especially given their titles). The Leviathans they identify are not fish at all, but the diffuse political and economic substructure of capitalism itself.  How do they do this?  They address the way in which the ship becomes a metonymic figure of the monstrous machine, and ocean a forgotten space or conceptual gap of the capitalist system -- a space in which the ship, as a means of exploitation labor and natural resources, has largely made the processes of colonization and globalization possible.
SEL Leviathan
But I get ahead of myself. Perhaps it is important to start with some older fish stories, some older Leviathans to see how we jump from whale to boat.  Leviathan, is an ancient Hebrew word, most probably derived from even more ancient near eastern mythological sources, and was used in the Old Testament to describe a wriggling serpent with skin-like shields, impenetrable to arrows, who would be killed only at the end of times.  Many early maps including Ptolomy’s Geographia, began using the figure in the water regions. By the Medieval era, leviathans were common marginalia, haunting the edges of charts and the space outside knowledge. A fierce creature without fear, the leviathan acted as the embodiment of the evil, uncontrollable and chaotic forces of nature. [i]
 By the age of discovery, the ocean began to play an ever more important role in creating world systems -- integrating and connecting economies, enabling and propelling new territorialization by appropriating people and land on new continents and islands.[ii]  As the watery regions of our world were increasingly known, leviathans eventually disappeared from the watery spaces on maps, or at least became aestheticized motifs. This aestheticization would be consistent with the adoption of the figure of the leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 essay on the importance of the social contract and the rule of the sovereign.  Hobbes took the biblical understanding of leviathan (“There is no power on earth to be compared to him.” Job 41. 24), and applied it to an understanding of the necessity of statecraft in which strong government kept the chaotic “state of nature” at bay. As the figure of the leviathan was displaced from ocean to land, it was re-figured as an unstoppable force of civil law and the right to property. The sovereign-leviathan became the massive corpus of the nation-state composed of its citizens.  Indeed, the project of the state, especially in conjunction with the project of imperialism and the birth of modern capitalism during this period, became the new image of the leviathan. 
But if we look again at the ocean as a necessary but invisible space to this historical project of statecraft, we can begin to read the figure of Hobbes’s leviathan against the grain, not as a powerful central government, but as one of the origins of the self-perpetuating logic of state that depended on economic expansion outside of its domain. As historian Carl Schmitt long ago noted in his 1942 book about the British Empire, Land and Sea, that as the British state expanded to empire, “the leviathan was turning into a machine.”[iii]  That is the power of the sovereign had to be upheld by the apparatus of wealth acquisition—most especially the ship.
In the era of Empire, the ocean acted as medium for the ship as well as a useful gap in communication, information, and knowledge—a buffer between the citizens of Europe and expropriation happening in its name elsewhere.  It reinforced a perception that the ocean and anything beyond was not a part of the national political imaginary.  As Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher argue in the introduction to their volume Many Middle Passages, “most people in the eighteenth century, like most people today, tended to regard as real only the land…. The oceans were vast, ahistorical voids.”[iv] The ocean began to operate as the medium on which nation-states and capital could extend their reach, even as, or more correctly, because it was, strategically left out of the purview of territorial law and the ideal of sovereignty.
This conception of the free sea was already circulating in England by the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, thanks to a translation of Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum, dated to around 1616. In this tract the Dutch jurist described the “ocean, the expanse of water which antiquity described as immense, infinite, bounded only by the heavens, parent of all things, which can neither be seized nor enclosed, nay which rather possesses the earth than is possessed.”[v] He self-consciously referenced the ancient romantic imagery of the ocean, and leveraged it toward his main argument—that sovereign nations should be free to exert state power economically and militarily on the high seas.  (This treatise was a defense of the Dutch East India Company against Portuguese claims to exclusive trading rights in the Southwest Pacific).
Grotius’s grandiose claims have since supported the continual renewal of doctrine of free trade and free cruising, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.[vi]  The high seas are waters outside a 200 mile perimeter off a nation’s shoreline, now defined as the Exclusive Economic Zone.  <The EEZ zones are hotly contested (especially in the South China Sea, and in the North, where new petroleum resources have been identified as ice caps melt, causing Russia, Canada and the Scandinavian countries to update their territorial claims>.  Outside of these zones, the ocean is still mostly a vast unregulated space.  
This loose narrative I am spinning here, in which the leviathan exits the ocean, becomes landed, mechanized, and sets sail again in order to navigate the “empty space” of the ocean is basically the sort of “big picture” history and argument that Sekula writes in Fish Story, begun in 1989 and completed in 1995.   Documenting the ramifications of the discourse of the “free ocean,” the book includes hundreds of photos (these are just a few) that he took at just about every major port around the world then in operation – many of them new huge super ports built to load and unload the ever larger super container ships.   These images are punctuated by lengthy essays, one called “the Dismal Science,” in which Sekula unpacks a history of the naturalized construct of the open “unbounded” ocean in direct correlation to the development of a “bounded” and invisible game of contemporary production and distribution of capitalism.  As he moves from national and empirical maritime history toward the advent of transnational capital and trade, he insinuates that power, once manifested in the figure of sovereign state has become a “fluctuating web of connections, lines of exploitation that run from London to Hong Kong, to Shenzhen to Taipei…. Drawing ravenously on the rock-bottom labor costs of the new factory in the border city of Shenzhen…(48)

Sekula positioned the development of containerization as the key element to the history he tells.  Though pioneered in the fifties and sixties, and developed in an ad hoc way over the decades, costing companies, governments, ports, and labor unions billions, it finally reached a point of relative fluidity in the eighties. The regularity and relative ease with which boxes could be moved from trucks to trains to ships and back to trucks or trains created a sense that transnational production and distribution was inevitable.[i]
Its closed box, sealed at the factory and not opened again until delivery at the store, and with its “superficial clarity of straight lines” (50), came to represent a certain elegance and regularity of the global factory. For consumers, Sekula argued, it perpetuated a sense that globalization was a “dematerialized, fluid information exchange” in which people could call in mail orders for goods that would magically appear on their door step (50). It also erased everything in between: The radical deregulation of dock and ship labor, as well as the deregulation of tariffs and taxes between countries. In the end Sekula declared: “The container has become the very emblem of capitalist disavowal.” (248) 
The labor crisis has always been at the forefront of Sekula’s mind. His earlier photo projects dealt specifically with labor rights, and this is what took him to the ports in the first place.  Many of the photos in Fish Story feature the life, work, and politics happening during the automation and deregulation of the port operations, as well as the out-of-sight labor activities on board the ships when at sea. <Labor on board > It is these photos where Sekula references Melville’s whale story most clearly.
Melville’s tale is well known for deflating the romance of whaling by focusing the reader’s attention on page after page of details about Ishmael’s life on board the Pequod and his knowledge of whales and the whaling industry.  Many literary critics have argued that Melville’s ploy to hold up the story by suspending time with digressions into cetology, folklore, essays on the ship’s tools, structure and operation, not only becomes an allegory of time spent on the ocean, but also highlights the role of the Pequod as an extension of the period’s industrial mechanizations and behemoth—and leviathanian—appetites of capital.[ii]  The high seas become an ambiguous space onto which the rule of law and the rule of nature seem to intertwine. The Piquod was, in effect, not just a whaling ship, but a floating sweatshop factory dominated not by an enlightened monarch, but by a despot consumed with revenge.[iii] Melville focuses on these themes, but strategically through an exhaustic recounted of the labor it took to keep the ship afloat and harvest the whale blubber.  As such, the larger thematic of the book works in strategic resistance to a long history of exaggerated tall tales of adventure at sea often told by fisherman. 
Like Melville, Sekula, put his title in playful paradox to the images of the work of a sailor’s life. This forces the reader to reconsider the fluidity and romance of globalization often encapsulated and framed as “fish stories.”[iv] Sekula organized photos after photo of (mostly) men working on the decks, in the engine rooms, at the ports, first for galleries as framed pieces, then as slide shows, and finally as a quite considerable book.  All of these formats, but especially the book, lend an experience to viewers in which they experienced the slow rhythm of work, the monotony of the ship’s life, and also the repeated exploitation of their labor across global space.
In the last part of text in Fish Story, Sekula focuses on the vessel at sea. He charts the history of ships as mutinous heterotopias.  Building on Foucault, he argues that this floating piece of space offers a model of normative culture simultaneously “represented, contested, and inverted.” In these terms he describes Melville’s Billy Budd, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and also notes a 1950s reading of Moby Dick by Trinidadian socialist CLR James in which he argues that the crew of the Pequod is seen as a universalist republic (one that tragically, does not usurp power from Ahab). Sekula then pivots into a discussion of how containerization has squelched the heterotopic potential of ships. Most container ships, even more rigorously than the Pequod, cull their international crews from countries with the least regulations and lowest labor costs; at the time of Fish Story’s publication these were Philippines, Indonesia, China, Honduras).  But, Sekula argues, the size, the regulations, and the systemization of the ships themselves “blunts the mutinous longing” of the sailors. (184) As ports have shifted away from metropolitan space to Special Zones, as ships have become mechanized, as companies keep costumers focused on the catalog and the doorstep and not in between, the ship and its sailors at sea are forgotten.[v]
Throughout the entire project, Sekula attempts not just to create a visibility for this overlooked space, but also to remind us of its material intensity. He says, “Our society of accelerated flows is also, in certain key aspects, a society of deliberately slow movement.” (50) Literally, these huge ships use 300 tonnes of fuel a day, depending on how fast they are moving.  And it takes roughly about 2 weeks to cross the Atlantic, and three to cross the Pacific. And that type of slowness is nothing compared to the slowness of life at sea for indentured ship hands pressed into service, some who don’t see land for years or decades.
Sekula tries to captures this slowness, in what has now become the iconic photograph of the series: the container ship making its way through the ocean, taken from the back of the ship atop the containers. The ship feels at once huge and lumbering and also relatively small as it tries to cut through the rough gray waters.  Not the fluid fast pacific of the political imaginary.
Fish Story and Sekula’s later films on the same subject have become important hallmarks in critical realism. His Marxist critiques and anti-aesthetic documentary style have led to a slew of similar exposes of capitalism’s systemic reach. <i.e. photos of Ed Burtansky, >[vi] And yet, his persistent contextualizing voice-over, acting as a guide to reading the images in a clear and unambiguous way, now feels a bit overweening.
An alternative approach that has become more prevalent lately is a kind documentary filmmaking in which the voiceover is completely abandoned for the affective and intensive materialist potential of the footage itself.  One of the most interesting proponents of this method is Sensory Ethnography Lab, run as a cross-disciplinary graduate program out of Harvard. Their 2012 film Leviathan, directed by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, was featured at the Whitney Biennial.  (It now has a wide release and it available for streaming on Netflix.)  Leviathan focuses on a commercial trawling vessel operating out of New Bedford, Massachusetts (also the origin of Melville’s Pequod). In titling the film Leviathan, the filmmakers, like Sekula, reference the allegory of Ahab and the great white whale and connect the modern industrial fishing industry to the 19th century whaling industry.
The 87 minute video captures the immense power of the machines that operate the huge cranes, and vast nets and trawlers of this huge commercial boat that essentially scrapes the bottom of the ocean around Georges Bank to catch cod, haddock and yellow tail (and in the process damages the reef and coral).  While it might seem that such a film, to expose what’s going on under the water and in the boats, needs panoramic and establishing shots as well as a narrator.  But the filmmakers resisted this.  Instead, all images are up-close, cropped, partial, and very intense, filmed by multiple go-pro cameras that the filmmakers simply stuck to various parts of the boat itself.
SEL’s method of observing and critiquing this industry is a combination of materialist aesthetics and ethnography, essentially converting Clifford Geertz’s notion of “thick description,” into a purely visual medium. Geertz’s ethnographic field approach was to write an accumulation of observations that not only focused on human subjects, but also their material technology, unspoken codes, and gestural signifiers.  It was a strategic kind of anthropology developed in the sixties, to improve upon patronizing methods of the past and to get at unspoken or extra-discursive cultural structures.  Yet it still privileged the observational acuity of the anthropologist who collects all of this data and mediates it for the reader. SEL’s use of multiple go-pros attached to the ship itself (ostensibly the field upon which the film’s ethnographic subject operates) seeks to collapse this “objectifying” distance. We experience the activities of the ship through the barnacle eyes of the go-pros attached to the ship itself.  It makes the views compelling, strange, even horrific and gothic.
Even from the angle of this go pro camera, probably mounted on the arm of one of the trawlers with a view of the prow, we are positioned to identify with the ship, plunging in and out of the water, getting partial views of its body and the birds that flock around it and the sea that envelops it. With no voice-overs, but with very calculated sound design and editing, it enhances our experience as the boat encounters the unbelievable power of the ocean and the overwhelming abundance of its creatures. We can hear the machinery of the boat, the intense sound of the birds, as well as the deafening sound of the water. It creates an overwhelming luscious, absorbing and dis-orienting experience, we lose a human positioning in the film.
In this clip, with no sound, you can imagine the ship’s cranes, the squish of the nets and the flapping of the fish. Here the go pro is positioned at the bottom on the ship’s hull. We see the net release and the fish fill our space.  Eyes and bodies are everywhere in total chaos, filling the monumental void of the ship, and eventually obliterating our vision. The immense life of the sea meets its anonymous death.
 When the film does focus on more “human” spaces and activities, it still positions us in a similarly intensive way, as if, again, we were the eyes of the ship only getting fragments and close-ups of the workers’ tattooed, sweaty skin. Even the few traditional shots like this one—of a bleary eyed modern day Ishmael who appears to be barely awake as he operates dangerous cranes to the tune of death metal—are composed through the reflective mediated glass of the ship. His humanness is absorbed into its operation and he obviously struggles to keep up with its persistent demands.
Like Sekula, SEL seems to be using Melville’s underlying message for their film: that the real monster is not the sea creature, but man, his machine-ships, and his designs to control nature. As Melville famously wrote, “there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” Indeed, both Sekula’s and SEL’s films show this madness to be so thoroughly widespread as to be almost fully automated.  Loosely speaking, Sekula and SEL are interested in the fact that there are  no Ahabs on board the container and industrial fishing ships.  If these ships have captains they do not entirely control the course of the ship.  The individual’s madness has been replaced with a emergent “madness” (and blindness to that madness) rooted in the uncontrollable leviathan that is the systemacity of capitalism itself.[vii]

Though very different in approach, SEL’s Leviathan is consistent with Sekula’s earlier project in that it too emphasizes a geopoetics of the ocean.  Both shorten our conceptual distance to its space and offer a different experience of the ocean as material, not cartopgraphic, but I also think its fair to say that SEL’s ambition is to further close the gap between the space of perception and the space of the ocean.
What I want to ultimately suggest is that SEL’s current trajectory of a materialist critical realism offers us some interesting strategic openings for thinking about the ocean.  As the ship, we become enmeshed and slowed down by the tension of the water and the claustrophobic swirls of the gulls. The ocean is seen as a powerful force in its own right, excessive of human control, in which our understanding of the ship’s ambitions become delayed and potentially rerouted.
 I see SEL’s work is part of a larger trajectory for realism in art, in creating a sensitivity to aspects of our earth, and our treatment of it. I am interested in the artists <Dean> who make ships turn into beached whales, and photographers who capture beached whales as dry-land toxic chemical spills. If these images of disaster upset or even disgust us, it’s worth taking a moment to also ask why.
Such images might offset what Sekula articulates as our current emphasis on the abstract measured distance of the ocean.  The processes of modernity and technology give us the sense that we don’t really have to pay attention to the ocean as a chaotic force anymore. We takes instant and multiple measurements the wind, calculate currents, monitory shipping lanes instead of worry about the elements. But in using Moby Dick, and Melville’s alternative sense of rhythm and charting—especially this one found at the back of the original edition in which one can see how Moby Dick makes Ahab meander around the ocean—we get a different kind of experience of the ocean and of ships. The absurdity of finding any whales, let alone a single particular whale, in such a vast ocean is shown in the circuitous trajectory of the ship. Ahab’s ambition looks a little like an ant scurrying aimlessly across a sidewalk. Extended to the present moment, the map charts the absurdity of whale blubber as a 19th century energy solution and as such becomes a useful and humbling allegory of our current methods of resource extraction from the ocean, including commercial trawling.  Like it or not, our seemingly efficient methods of resource extraction and transportation rarely cut a straight line.
I’m going to be upfront and partisan here in stating that I think we need more materialist anti-epics like Leviathan. Without the stabilized Hollywood shot-reverse-shot and other overly conventional Euclidian coordinates of representation, we lose ourselves in the vastness of the ocean and the immediacy of its creatures. And in attending to the closeness and thingness of the world to our bodies, what Deleuze refers to as the smooth space of haecceities, we suddenly have an alternative access to the world.
Artistic representations have long exploring the potential of the ocean to overwhelm us and hence to act as a powerful debaser of human progress. From Turner’s Slave Ship to Tacita Dean’s chalkboard series.   But I’m not talking only about the sublime disaster here. 
It seems to me, that one of the things art can do affectively, as a “cartography of sensation,” is not only to call attention to the politics of labor on the ship, and to the function of the ship itself, but also to refocus our attention toward the ocean as a space of irresolution, delay, and failure. If we can learn to reside in that space a bit longer perhaps it will force us to more thoroughly consider our eventual and inevitable choices as our journey moves onward.

[i] Discuss NAFTA and GATT as to creating a “friction free business infrastructure.” (50).

[ii] See especially the collection of essays edited by John Bryant, Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby Dick (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006).

[iii] Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea

[iv] He tells of a Sea-Land crew picking up the first super container ships from the Daewoo ship yard in South Korea, and finding a curious inventory of improvised quite rudimentary tools. He tells another of the “company town” outside an old fishing village in Mipo Bay, Ulsan Korea, a large ship yard that is the center of Hyundai heavy industry in which he describes the origins of the Korean shipbuilding industry trace to the purchase of a plans from a bankrupt Scottish yard in the 1970s.  A number of unemployed Glasgow shipwrights migrated to Ulsan.  And equally to a Korean crane driver, trained by Americans during the Vietnam war to unload military cargo, cum shipping executive.

[v] The system of labor exploitation deregulation operates through loophole of the “flag of convenience,” laws, which allow ship companies, no matter where they are based, to be able to register their ships in countries that have little or no taxes, lax regulations and labor laws. As Sekula puts it, “The flag on the stem become a legal ruse, a lawyerly piratical dodge.”

[vi] Abigail Susik, Convergence Zone: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in Contemporary Art and Photography,” feature essay in Drain Magazine, vol. 15, “Supernature,” Spring 2012.

[vii] In reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that Capitalism induces a schizoid tendency of the split subject.   This depiction of global operations as a Leviathan is a departure from critiques that have targeted corrupt governments more directly.  Take the 12014 film Leviathan’s portrayal of a “venal, organized church, along with a sickeningly corrupt political system and a sloshed, atomised society.” (Shaun Walker, Gaurdian, Nov. 6, 2014).

[i] Chet Van Duzer, Sea monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (London: British Library, 2013).  Van Duzer surveys the way monsters on the edge of the mapped medieval world orient viewers to Africa’s coasts, the north seas in Olaus Magnus’s 1536 map, sawfish off South America by 1546, or leviathans off the mythical Java la Grande — treating all as markers of mapped space.

[ii] Peter Miller, The Sea: Thalassology and Historiography (University of Michigan Press 2013).  See also Baudel’s Le Mediteranee…

[iii] Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 51. (Quoted in The container principle, 94)

[iv]  Marcus Rediker, Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher Many Middle Passages, Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (University of California Press, 2007). See also Marcus Rediker’s The Many Headed-hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. As Rediker has also noted, the ocean’s isolating qualities has also enabled it to be a space of contestation, resistance, and anarchy. He has productively resuscitated the term Hydarchy from maritime history.  Hydarchy was coined by an English nobleman the term to describe the unique self-organization of the ship as a political entity – a floating island both related to the rules of its port of call, and thus an extension of the nation-state and, especially in the midst of the ocean seas, but also one with a potentially anarchic space of resistance.

[v] (Sekula, 43 / Grotius, 1916 trans., p. 37)

[vi] Another reference point: The USS Leviathan – WWI battle ship covered in dazzle camouflage.)

<![CDATA[Liquid Logistics]]>Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:11:29 GMThttp://www.liquidarchives.com/the-archives/liquid-logistics
migrants in a ghost ship travel ing from Syria to Europe
90% of our consumer goods are now shipped in containers across the oceans and continents.  The container box is so pervasive it seems a rather innocent matter of fact object.  In fact it is part of a huge global infrastructure supported by logistical algorithms.  Keller Easterling has recently described this kind of technology and logistical infrastructure as extra statecraft, “undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in partnership with statecraft."[i] With 5 million data centers and transfer stations, computing daily costs of factories, labor-forces, shipping ports, container lines, and oil prices, this network is one of the largest energy users in the world.[ii] Though the infrastructure is materially intensive, it cultivates a perception that global consumption is an automated, ever-circulating network of container boxes creating an efficient economies of scale. Since the 1970s, the revolution in container shipping has transformed every aspect of the commodity supply chain.   Before the advent of containerization, dock workers took weeks to pack in jumbled stockpiles of goods on ships.  It was so incredibly labor intensive and expensive to transfer goods from far away places and to make the many transitions— from factory to truck or train, to boat, back to truck or train, to store— that it limited the amount of globally available items.  With the standardization of containers, now 20 and 40 foot steel boxes, along with standardized trucks, trains, ships and cranes, AND the development of software to track all these boxes—we now have very extensive and convoluted supply chains charging back and forth across the oceans. 

To take advantage of the cheapest labor markets and shipping port costs, there is a perpetual transit of inventories of parts or unprocessed materials that go from factories to other factories before goods (in this case fish) get boxed up again and sent to distribution warehouses or stores. The ability of business logistics to control the supply chain so tightly has allowed a dramatic shift in capitalism since the nineties. Profit has moved from sites of production to sites of circulation: that is, corporations now calculate their profit not just in terms of cost of materials and labor-saving technologies at the factory; but in terms of “value-added” in the system just-in-time organization of production and delivery systems –costs of ports, customs, shipping, etc.
Seeing containerization as extrastatecraft is to begin to recognize its biopower—its systemic reach in regulating and normalizing not only the production of things, but also the production of an itinerant global labor force, not to mention the production of a de-politicized consumer citizenry. [iii]

The problem with this is that the algorithms of global “cost effective trade” override the violence and precariousness it instantiates.  Containerization comes with the deregulation and increased itinerancy of labor, sometimes indentured and even enslaved, all around the world—Labor working in the world’s factories but also port systems, transportation hubs, call centers, and ships are all affected.  The trade system compels millions to try to cross borders – and oceans – illegally, often sealing themselves in container ships that usually pass through borders much more freely than people. The top picture is of a modified container from early 2000s that was used for trafficking Chinese immigrants across the Pacific to the Port of Seattle. This bottom image is more recent, from January 3, 2015 depicting 1,000 Syrian refugees in the bottom of a rusting old container ship that was set on autopilot and launched for Italy’s rugged coastline and stopped by their coastguard.
My larger point here very quickly is that for shipping companies and multinationals operating beyond national borders, the costs of labor control, as well as the “security” of safe passage —security from pirates, wars, and natural disasters —are mostly externalized and subsidized by government-sponsored trade agreements, military support, and transportation infrastucture.[iv]  However these issue are largely invisible and if they are visible at all, it is while the containers are “en route” and away from public scrutiny.
There are a number of artists who seek to create more visibility for these conditions by appropriating the image of the container: Chinese artist Liu Jianhua and Ni Haifeng both put emphasis on the chaotic mass of absurd things hidden containers that we are motivated to ship halfway around the world. Ursela Beimann’s Contained Mobilization a video installation that tells the story of an asylum seeker perpetually shuffled across borders and Santiago Sierra’s Workers who cannot be paid project, in which he paid Chechnyan exiles to sit under these boxes for six weeks during an exhibition, have also dealt with the politics of immigrant trafficking in containers. These are all important projects recognized by the larger global art world.  

[i] Easterling, 15.

[ii] Klose, 230. Currently, approximately 90% of non-bulk cargo worldwide is moved by containers stacked on transport ships.

[iii] In his review of Extrastatecraft, Carson Chan asks:  What could we learn if we reframe race, blackness, whiteness, as infrastructure space? Rather than hanging an entire discursive and aesthetic project on a single technology, observers of the post-Internet art movement would find the concept of infrastructure space – of a contextual frame layered with many networks – particularly enriching.   Carson Chan, Art Papers 2015.  Example of labor biopower from Cowen: The Transport Workers Identity Credential has been nothing short of a disaster. TSA sent letters to tens of thousands of individuals suggesting they may not be eligible for a TWIC because they may have been convicted of a crime. Then, TSA put the onus on the workers to prove they were never convicted. Under this twisted logic, workers were guilty until they could prove themselves innocent. TSA sat on these appeals for an average of 69 days. The result was thousands of workers left unemployed, unable to make house and car payments, or attend to their families’ needs. According to a July 2009 National Employment Law Project report, African- Americans and Latinos waited even longer. On average, African Americans waited one month more than their white counterparts, which translated to one month more in lost wages. Latinos on average waited two months longer. 119

[iv] BREAD RIOTS Along Global Supply Chains: From Cairo to Longview
The world’s most bountiful wheat harvest ever was in 2008 yet bread riots broke out in 33 countries, adding in that year another 250 million to those without enough to eat everyday — pushing the world’s “food insecure” to over 1 billion. Food as a percentage of total household consumption costs has reached 73% in Nigeria, 63% in Nigeria and 61% in the Ukraine. Bread riots in Egypt were preceded by the April 6, 2008 general strike of textile workers, who demanded higher wages to cope with wheat prices that had risen 130% (rice also went up 74%). Egypt is the world’s leading wheat importer; the U.S. is the world’s top wheat exporter. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index of 18 foodstuffs was created in 1991 to allow speculators to invest in financialized futures on ingredients like hard red spring wheat, the world’s most popular high-protein ingredient in bread. After the 2008 food bubble collapsed, 200 million bushels of wheat were sold for animal feed while hundreds of millions went hungry. As Asian countries become more affluent, they eat less rice and more meat and bread. EGT Corporation in Longview, Washington has built a rapid just-in-time grain delivery system to allow speculators to move wheat, corn and other grains for food and animal feed down global supply chains to growing markets in Asia. Japan is the world’s #1 corn importer; the U.S. is the #1 exporter. EGT is doing what Wal-Mart does, but in reverse. Multinational food giants like EGT monopolize commodities from the farms of North America to food consumers across the planet. This multimedia presentation of recent struggles will be followed by an open discussion of ways we can contribute to the decommodification of not only food, but our lives and society as well.
<![CDATA[Plastiglomerate]]>Fri, 15 Jul 2016 14:00:59 GMThttp://www.liquidarchives.com/the-archives/plastiglomeratePictureKelly Jazvac Plastiglomerate Sample
Aesthetic Encounters with Petro-Capitalism

This is the introduction to a forthcoming article by myself and Jan Dickey for a volume on Climate Change in Hawaii and the Pacific.

In 2014 artist Kelly Jazvac, along with scientists Patricia Corcoran and Charles Moore, identified some curious stone formations on Kamilo Beach, located on the southeast tip of Hawaii Island. They appeared to be rock conglomerates; stones composed of lava rock, coral, organic materials, sand, and––what is most striking––colorful plastic debris. Jazvac and her collaborators dubbed this discovery “plastiglomerate,” writing an article together for the Geological Society of America’s news magazine GSA Today.[1]  They argued that this new stone could be understood as a visual and material indicator of large-scale anthropogenic impact on the planet. The theory put forth in GSA Today is that beach bonfires heat up the plastic flotsam, allowing it to glom onto other natural and unnatural substances. The result is a curious human-oceanographic-geologic collaboration involving distribution, sedimentation, and metamorphosis. 

The plastic found on Hawaii’s beaches is just a fraction of the ocean trash currently concentrated in the middle of the North Pacific currents. The Hawaiian archipelago, forming a huge arc in the middle of this convergence zone, acts as a giant dragnet or trap for the plastic. The floating debris often traps turtles, monk seals, dolphins, and whales.  As the material breaks down in the ocean and along the islands’ shores, bits of it become part of the regular but indigestible diet of birds, endangering entire species.[2]  Once it breaks down even further, it attracts toxins.  These micro-plastics are digestible for plankton, crabs and fish, introducing poisons into the food chain.

For artists like Jazvac, this drifting plastic is not only an indicator of the permanent mark humans are leaving on the planet, but also a new artistic medium with which to create perceptual and attitudinal shifts about our petroleum-based lifestyle in general.  As the ocean’s many great garbage patches move in concert with industrialized society, plastiglomerate stones exist as easy-to-grasp (both literally and metaphorically) artifacts of petrochemical structures that are usually only noticed indirectly, and only on either the molecular and the global scale.  
Indeed, the atmospheric and ecological shifts that come from releasing so many greenhouse gases related to petroleum use are a challenge to our current and limited modes of perceiving and conceptualizing the world. The major impasse of climate change debates has to do with the very fact that we cannot see our impact to the Earth’s climate systems with our naked eyes, which introduces conflicting interpretative lenses. While some argue that the climate has always been changing and our short-term records are useless, many many others see the statistical incline of CO2 and natural disasters as clearly marking “The Great Acceleration,” beginning with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.[3] Even if we rationally understand the impact that our species is having on the climate, it is still hard for traditional modes of perception, calculation, and conceptualization to capture the complex causal relationship between daily behavior and global shifts: using plastic bags and hurricanes, for instance.
At its very core, this is not only a scientific or political problem, but an aesthetic problem—a problem of how to see and experience objects, forces, and changes both much much larger than our human rhythms, longer than human lifetimes, and also much much smaller than our eyes can see.  The logical explication of accumulated data (weather records, ice core samples, ocean current tracking, population statistics, etc.) still does not convince all of us. Art can help with this conundrum, primarily because it can engage our ability to perceive the nonhuman scale of such data as affective residue.  For instance, the framing of objects like plastiglomerate not only as “factual evidence” but also as uncanny, poetic, and aesthetic things allows for the imagination to sense climate change as conflicted emotion.  That is, a piece of plastiglomerate can be taken as an object of contemplation, allowing us to dwell on feelings of wonder at the sublimity of climate change, a sense of futility of individual action, and even self-doubt over whether this is all just a paranoid episode.  It also allows discovery of shared sensitivities and responsibilities for such complexity. In short, it is important to acknowledge the power of our affective or visceral responses to such objects. It is important to acknowledge the power and emotion of not being able to understand or resolve.  These experiences are undoubtedly different than what we would consider a traditional “logical” or “complete” scientific understanding of climate change, but arguably they are just as powerful and persuasive.

[1] Patricia Corcoran, Kelly Jazvac, and Charles Moore, “An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record,” GSA Today (June 2014): 4-8.

[2] Sileo, Louis, et al. "Prevalence and characteristics of plastic ingested by Hawaiian seabirds." Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Marine Debris. Vol. 2. 1989.

[3]  Charts of the Great Acceleration were originally published in 2004. Recent updates are provided in Will Steffen, et.al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review vol. 2, n. 2 (April 2015): 81-98.
<![CDATA[OCEAN AS ARCHIVE]]>Mon, 27 Jun 2016 17:22:46 GMThttp://www.liquidarchives.com/the-archives/hong-kong-art-baselFor Art Basel Hong Kong (March 2016) I was invited by Asia Art Archive to participate in a panel hosted by the artists MAP office.  The following was a brief introduction for discussion.

It would be interesting to think about the ocean as an archive.  Literally.  Does it employ shelves or rather shark holes? Or is it composed in an altogether different kind of organization? What does it archive?  These questions reminded me of a short tall tale by Michel Serres at the beginning of his book Genesis in which he finds a message-a-bottle archive of sorts.
I found myself one fine morning in the green and stagnant waters of the Sargasso Sea, at a mysterious spot where thousands of tiny sparks, all shapes and all colors were glimmering crazily.  Bearing off, I was dumbfounded to see an area almost two hundred and fifty acres square entirely populated by dancing bottles. There were countless little vessels, and each one no doubt bore its message ….ballasted with seawrack and rockery, each carried its hope and its despair.  Constant and perilous collisions.  Cacophonic noise across the horizon. (1)
This sea of bottles represents a space of memory that is both a cultural and ecological log.   It holds messages of human connections sent but never received, and also stands as evidence of historic patterns that keep these particular calm waters full of Sargasso grasses and human detritus and the currents of the Atlantic Ocean’s swirl about it.  Serres gives a lyrical introduction to the ocean as a medium that bears witness both to geologic time and human time. Is this what it means for the ocean to be an archive?
Charles Lim, Rope Sketch
It is interesting to think about the ocean as archive especially in light of the fact that it seems to have largely functioned as an anti-archive in recent human history. A fluid, turgid medium that at times escapes accounting.  We think about the speed and connection of the global goods system, but only if we don’t notice how labor and energy intensive it is to drive such machines thousands of miles each day over the seas. As photographer Allan Sekula called it, the ocean is often considered “a forgotten space” of capitalism.  This is a phrase repeated throughout his foundational art as research project, A Fish Story, a hallmark account of the global trade and port system at the advent of neo-liberalization.
Sekula’s claim is related to a longer history of the rise of empire in which oceans actively functioned to hide the violence with which vast wealth of nation states were achieved.   As historians such as Markus Rediker have argued, oceans have been kept strategically outside and invisible to the imaginaries of nation and empire. Rediker (along with Cassandra Pybus, and Emma Christopher) argue in the introduction to their volume Many Middle Passages, Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, “most people in the eighteenth century, like most people today, tended to regard as real only the land…. The oceans were vast, ahistorical voids.” The ocean began to operate as the medium on which nation-states and capital could extend their reach, even as, or more correctly, because it was, strategically left out of the purview of territorial law and the ideal of sovereignty.
The history of world systems of trade and politics have always been based on the invisible leverage of oceans (as free seas for fluid trade and resource extraction (oil, whales, fish, etc.) and as an invisible medium to hide movement of populations as well as the risk of trade. This sentiment has been updated by anthropologist Michael Taussig, who claims that the disappearance of the maritime is now a global phenomenon. He says, our societies are “utterly dependent,” on ships and the sea, yet “nothing is more invisible.”

But as oceans are now becoming strategic sites of global geopolitics – with new fights over exclusive economic boundaries and precious resources, competition over global ports and shipping lanes—we can see how important they have always been to the history of world systems, and how ever-more important they are in an age of globally networked and interdependent economies and politics.
Global shipping patterns.

We need to start seeing these activities as an archive in the making.   A record of globalization written on the waves.  They needs to be recorded, made visible, developed into readable statements about the effects of globalization on the earth, not suppressed or erased.  I am starting to accumulate some possible archives of this global activity for my current book project Liquid Archives.

I am interested in artists and other researchers who look at trade routes and logistical spaces of ocean transport.  For instance social scientist Charmaine Chua has a blog (the Disorder of Things) as part of her dissertation project on the logistics of containerization for the U of Michigan.  In it she details the lives and activities aboard container ships as well as the politics of chock points along the supply chain.  This is a nice follow up to Sekula’s Fish Story.  Marina Zurkow’s recent show, More and More, in February-April 2016 at biforms in New York, presented a series of objects, websites and digital files that raise awareness for the global commodity system largely made possible by the container system.   The objects could be printed from digital files sold through her website, moreandmore.world: Harmonized System commodity code wallpaper, casual wear with More and More logos and 3-D printed objects.

Map Office’s work on the production spaces of Shenzhen and Hong Kong after 1997 have done much to demonstrate ways to potentially document and create an alternative archive of the shipping and manufacturing industry in China.  Since then, they have moved from mapping “production space” to mapping what they call the “liquid territories” of islands, littoral zones and shores.  Their current project, MARE LIBERUM will create the first map of the portions of the ocean that are currently NOT territorialized.  Instead of focusing on the standard geo-political visualization which privileges the territory of nation states, including the 200 mile extension of each nation’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), they attempt to map everything that cannot be claimed under the current agreements.  This kind of map presents an archive in reverse a possible document to preserve the parts of the oceans that can still be held as a commons for the future.

Charles Lim’s work SEA STATE project tries to recover the history of transformations of littoral zones/ shorelines of Singapore. Singapore as a city-state has grown by 130 square kilometers over the last 45 years through reclamation and Indonesia has lost two-dozen islands as a result.’  These are just of few of the current projects that offer new potential archival methodologies. 

They begin to think of the ocean as vast and viscous archive that shows the global complexity of human relationship, natural relationship. This is ultimately the theme of Michel Serres Genesis and why he uses his story of the bottles in the Sargasso Sea to begin.  Against our love of the unit, the individual, the contained, the black box, the scenic point of view he posits the ocean as a system of multiplicities from which we have turned away and to which we need to now return.   The ocean is not individuated, but global. It beckons what Serres calls ichnography -- what is possible, or knowable, or producible, it is the phenomenological wellspring…. As Serres argues, the ocean, in its chaos, in its seemingly uncoordinated “noise,” is the most evocative space for new possibilities of living. “It is the ensemble of possible probables, the sum of horizons.”