Learning From Logistics

Whenever I can’t fall asleep, I conjure in my head an image that, in some regard, encourages me to sleep. There’s a few rotating pictures that come into fruition, but the most common one is me, stumbling through some snowy forest. I am bundled up, but my clothing is bedraggled, as if I was lost in the woods for a time and nearing desperation. Death is not imminent, but I am exhausted, my body is slick with a thin layer of sweat and my legs are like swampy stumps ready to dissolve at any point. Suddenly, a small cabin appears on the edge of the wood; it looks abandoned, and, in its empty state, promising. I stagger towards it, throwing my body against the door and stumble inside. Nothing is in there except for a ratty mattress tossed on the floor, a few empty cans, and some leftover clothes. However, in the middle of the room stands a fireplace with some chunks of wood stacked beside it and ready to be burned. I leap toward the fireplace and (somehow) light a fire. It quickly starts to roar. I lie down beside it, almost cuddling the warmth, my knees thrust up into my chest. I feel like a block of ice, melting into the floor, disappearing, drifting away until there’s nothing there, just a trace, a residue of something that once was.

Why do I mention this? Because it’s a long-winded way to talk about the third batch of my temporary newsletter. Its very design is to appear and then not. To last as long as I am ‘in the field,’ and then, unceremoniously, go away. It’s an experiment in what I think of as atmospheric media, no different than the radio stations you tune into until the signal drops and you seek the next one and the next one. That is, it’s an ephemeral action that takes place at a specific point in time in a specific place only to disappear. Atmospheric media is present until its not.

Field Season 3 is now here, and I am on a cargo ship, departing from the small Finnish port of Kotka making our way to Antwerp over the course of about six days. I am travelling with some of my students and two colleagues from the architecture department of KTH University in Stockholm. It’s part of a larger project we call BLUEPORT. That’s an acronym but I can never remember it. Our goal is to merge photography and architecture, to reach across the aisle, so to speak, and introduce these different fields to each other as a new method to discover operational landscapes. Part of our thesis is that logistical space has far exceeded any one representational medium; it needs a different set of practices to manage its obscurity, its distance, its abstracting proclivities. But sitting in a traditional classroom, even if it’s a ‘cool’ one in an art school, can never fully address the demands of logistics and its spatial contortions. Thus, we travel on the very infrastructures we are exploring. Here we can participate and witness the labour that sustains such landscapes, and allow our bodies to succumb to the rhythms of the ship. For a few days, we become flesh and steel; our bones are not neutral, but complicit in the bigger operations of our ship and trade.

Which brings me to my common nighttime vision. Last night as I was lying in my bunk, which is about the same length and width of my body — I won’t call it a coffin as that’s too easy and rote — the ship ever-so-sightly swayed. I clicked off my little nightlight and was immediately consumed by darkness. We were a few kilometres offshore and so the only light leaking in through the cabin window was of the faint moon, barely visible and barely bright. I was in total darkness, sight had eluded me. It felt like I was floating, suspended, or even submerged, underwater. The throttle of the engine transmitted a constant rattle and vibration throughout the ship, snaking its way from the engine room through the steel panels along the flume across the linoleum floor past the steel door and into the wooden frame of my bunk. I rattled as the engine rattled. Giant chunks of ice knocked the ship about, making us all slightly sway like we were attending a folk music concert. I didn’t need my usual sleep vision as I was living it, cast at sea, ensconced in the dark, gently lulled into a sleep state by the soft vibrations. I fell asleep.