FutureLand: Stories from the Global Supply Chain

87 Pages·2018·15.529 MB·English

by  Centre of Research Architecture

This reader is the
outcome of a year-long
program of events,
workshops, pedagogical
experiments, and field
investigations initiated
by the Centre of Research
Architecture under the
umbrella of the project
Logistical Nightmares,
which explores the
increasing ubiquity and
prominence of logistics
as a mode for organising
social life and politics.
FutureLand:
Stories from
the Global
Supply Chain
This Reader is to accompany the film FutureLand made
by students of the Conflicts and Negotiations class
at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths
University of London 2017 – 2018
Content
Introduction – Susan Schuppli 6
Research and Video Excerpts:
Scales of Vision 8
Ditto + Ditto take a trip to Port Authority 26
Infranature 40
Cybergonomics 56
Climate Change 72
Radioactivity 88
Bibliography 104
Fieldwork – Port of Rotterdam:
Guided Tour to FutureLand – Transcript 120
Interview with Stefan Helmreich
and Heather Paxson 136
‘Indurable’ Monstrosities – Charmaine Chua 140
FutureLand Choreographies – Ifor Duncan 162
Colophon 169
Introduction
The experimental documentary FutureLand produced by the MA students in
Conflicts & Negotiations (2017–18) emerges out of fieldwork they conducted in the
Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest cargo and container port, as well as individual
research and collaborative writing that delved into the politics of our contemporary
logistical condition. Organised by an elliptical structure, the documentary cross-cuts
between temporalities and geographies to explore the ways in which the Port is deeply
entangled with the histories of colonialism, the legacies of maritime labour, the advent
of automation, the speculative fictions of global finance, the threat of sea level rise,
and the ecological consequences of an infrastructural imagination that have carved
a trading zone out of the liquid architecture of the sea. The documentary utilises a
wide range of source material from webcam streams to archival documents in addition
to footage, animations, field recordings, and voiceover narration produced by the
students themselves.
Its title – FutureLand – derives from the main public entry point into the Port
of Rotterdam where visitors depart on scheduled bus and boat tours. We too began our
day on water touring the docked ships and observing the cranes as they manoeuvred
their containers. ‘Ask me anything,’ our guide enjoined us... when we paused to take
Introduction –
pictures from our vantage point on the upper deck he resumed his running commentary.
It was a recital scripted entirely in superlatives: the biggest, the tallest, the deepest, the
heaviest, the largest, the greenest. Throughout the FutureLand video echoes of his
Susan Schuppli
speech come to act as a refrain that the various chapters utilise to call into question the
official public narratives of the Port, which are ultimately countered by the students’
own insights and approach to their research materials.
In addition to exploring the logistical operations of the Port itself, students
also bicycled around the adjacent industrial park documenting its petro-chemical
storage, which constitutes some of the primary cargo that transits through the Port.
Other students were able to interview Filipino mariners on shore-leave as well as
dockworkers in a local pub. A representative from the labour union, who was deeply
concerned about the loss of jobs both at sea and on land as a consequence of automation,
was interviewed later in Amsterdam. The MA students were joined by our PhDs as well
as invited guests: Stefan Helmreich, Heather Paxson, Giorgio Grappi, Víctor Muñoz
Sanz, Evelina Gambino, and Oscar Pedraza. Christina Sharpe kindly agreed to act as
a respondent to the first public screening of the documentary at Goldsmiths on 23 May
2018. Our work in the Netherlands was generously supported by the organisation and
staff at the Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam 2018.
As a collaborative project, the resulting video documentary and companion
reader exemplifies the spirit of peer-to-peer learning and stands as a significant set of
documents to have emerged out of this year’s MA programme in Research Architecture.
7
Video Excerpts
Scales of Vision
9
Video Excerpts Video Excerpts
From the distance, from the top,
from the surface, from above
the waterline, from resolution,
from details, what can we see?
Which scales of visibility
does our vision travel through?
10 11
Video Excerpts Video Excerpts
Distant images of efficiency
shape our perception. Mechanised
movements repeatedly, and eternally
inscribe the rhythms of capitalism.
Silently and without interruption,
flows of goods are illegible: expanding,
registering, identifying, anonymising,
optimising, automating. What lays
below the opacity produced by sterile
repetition? Do seamless images obscure
logistical operations?
12 13
Video Excerpts Video Excerpts
Do the pixels register processes
and violent histories of extraction,
of production, of over production,
of cheap labour, of cheap lives, lives
snatched, registered, identified,
anonymised, containerised,
relocated, optimised?
14 15
Video Excerpts Video Excerpts
These slow hypnotic images
and the frenetic pace of the world
move past one another, producing
an incapacity to see beyond.
16 17