There is no Horizon / There are only Horizons

MESSAGE lN A BOX 2015 RlSD GS GRANT REPORT AARON TOBEY

THERE lS NO HORlZON / THERE ARE ONLY HORlZONS:

Trans-Pacific Ocean crossing aboard ZIM San Francisco, 7/5/2015 - 8/30/2015 How does an architect design around the labor of those producing their work? Where do building materials come from and how are they transported? How do other media transform the experience of architecture? Who are the people and the places that occupy the interstices of global architectural knowledge and practice? These questions are only possible because architectural practice today has expanded beyond the design of buildings and discrete public places traditionally considered the purview of the discipline. Empowered by the globalization of knowledge, resources, and relationships, architectural practice has claimed all forms of space, from the infinitely abstract architecture of systems to the minuscule concrete and quotidian regimentation of bodily functions, as its medium. In doing so architectural practice as spatial practice has exposed the unspoken and tacit anthropocene assumption of the field today: Not only is everything nature and in its naming as such, therefore also epistemologically man-made, but as both Charles Eames and Hans Hollein both said almost a half century ago, specifically “Alles ist Architektur.” The role of architects has thus also had to expand, alongside the definition of their medium and the architecturalizing of the entire planet into a system of human habitation, to encompass “everything.” Architects are now part artist, anthropologist, biologist, physicist, politician, psychologist, and systems theorist. Through these new roles, new questions have emerged that seek to challenge spatial practice’s existing assumptions and reconfiguring the tools that architects design into emergent relationships and systems of systems.

Focusing on one such system of systems, containerization, I used my GS Grant as a means to gain a firsthand understanding of the physical and temporal dimension of its behaviors; the way it regiments individual objects and bodies in the service of the abstract goals of the digital-global economy. This unseen backbone for realizing digital-global desires, composed of container ships, ports, and other logistics facilities occupies enormous amounts of space, directs global economic flows and therefore was a natural entry point, focus and ultimately location of my study. Through a number of intermediary companies I arranged with the shipping company, ZIM to secure passage aboard a ship traveling between New York and China, stopping in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Kingston Jamaica, transiting the Panama Canal, and crossing the pacific to ports in Slavaknaya, Russia, and Quingdao China.

Once passage aboard the ship was confirmed, I leveraged personal connections to learn the origin, destination, and contents of one of the containers aboard the ship. In total, I spent 48 days traveling alongside the container, crossing international borders, time zones, and other abstract delineations that both subdivide and cohere the world and an additional 21 days traveling alone across very different borders, without the aid of the streamlined system of spatial and legal freedoms of global trade.

Corresponding with multiple of ZIM’s surrogates/proxies (NSB Riesburo, Maris Freighter Travel) as well as insurance companies (AIG, Blue Cross), foreign embassies (China, Panama, Russia), and banks (Santander, Agricultural Bank of China) I obtained the myriad clearances required for travel aboard the ZIM San Francisco (IMO 9400112). In gathering these clearances, I gained an understanding of the complex and overlapping authorities and jurisdictions that are aligned to facilitate the movement of goods and hinder the movement of people. Comparing the amount of documentation and security oversight required for myself and a container further illustrated the bias and scale of the infrastructure of international trade usually hidden deep within the legal disclaimers of airline tickets and development agreements that define global trade spaces. The documents recording the process of gaining clearances to travel formed the beginning of an archive built throughout the course of my travel and upon which my continued work is literally and metaphorically drawing. This documentation included my organizing of travel to the ship’s port of embarkation in Elizabeth, New Jersey and the mapping of container arrivals relative the arrival of the ship and my own departure.

Traveling aboard the ZIM San Francisco I observed and documented both people and containers as they traversed the world, interacting with each other and with other systems of transportation, knowledge, organization, and management. I learned the protocols that allow the system to operate, how it shapes and is shaped by cultural imagination, and how it interfaces with other systems of knowledge, capturing much of this knowledge

through photography, writings, interviews, and mappings. I had aimed to develop a database and website of these records to offer a pathway through which others could engage with this system. However, while aboard the ship I realized that many of the statistical, analytic, and structured methods I had intended to use to develop the database and website did not capture the compelling, candid, and personal narratives I discovered. Rather than formal recorded interviews with individual crew members, I began regular informal conversations amongst small groups as they worked, gaining their trust and access at the expense of direct recording. The focus on narratives rather than more abstract information led me to strategies such as journaling and archiving which better integrated with social media and other forms of communication through which I could stay in touch with the crew beyond my time aboard the ship. As such, my efforts at documenting the trip adopted the trans-spatial and trans-temporal qualities of the systems I was studying rather than singular and momentary snapshots.

Simultaneously both more metaphorically and literally, my documentation revealed that it was not so much the container that I was tracking but the systems of which the container is a constituent and organizing part and which emerged through the container’s interfacing behaviors. It became clear that the origin, destination, and contents of the container were inconsequential in comparison to the spaces and relationships the container structured. In fact, too much specific information regarding a single container inhibited its treatment as a metaphorical black box, a unit within an anticipatory system with the potential to engage the system at any point and in any combination. Having had this revelation mid-way through my travel on board the ZIM San Francisco, I was less dismayed when I was unable to directly track a particular container when I arrived in China and was required by immigration officials to disembark at a different port than initially planned. Instead, while I did eventually attempt to find the container, I refocused on the immense and often incongruous social and physical infrastructure surrounding container shipping that made “losing” a container possible. Additionally, because of being forced to disembark in a different port than planned, I was unable to arrange an interpreter and conduct interviews with Chinese officials and workers, but was able to spend extended periods of time observing multiple different ports and the similarities and differences between them.

The changes in my plans and a number of unforeseen, though informative occurrences had a direct effect on my budget as well as on the itinerary of my travel. These too contributed to my understanding of the as they revealed how the economic scale and the cost of engaging global trade systems creates spatial segregations and barriers to access. The economic imperatives of trade and the spatial controls they give rise to are an essential component of the container system’s architecture. Port fees, tolls, customs and tariffs, as well as the development of tariff-free zones direct and regulate the global flows of trade, intersecting national and transnational agendas with the real movements, desires, and histories of people and objects, interpolating them into the digital-global trade system in the process. My own interpolation into the system required that nearly the entirety of the grant funding be used to cover the cost of traveling aboard the container ship and included all meals as well as a few sundry items onboard. Due to timing constraints, before receiving the grant I personally invested $500 dollars in obtaining all materials required for travel including $300 dollars for vaccinations (Yellow Fever, Hepatitis, Typhoid) and $200 dollars in visa fees and other associated costs such as passport photographs and postage.

The complete documents along with my passport constituted a set of official information which I was required to keep in my possession throughout the trip and be able to produce on demand. Additionally, my return flight from China, costing $900, and all of my lodging and meal expenses while in China, totaling $250 were paid for using a combination of personal funds and the remaining grant money ($450). $150 dollars in immigration and transportation fees were paid by the NSB Riesburo, the company managing operations of the ZIM San Francisco, as a result of changes in Chinese immigration procedures instituted during the course of our sailing. Other items including supplies such as cameras, note/sketchbooks, and drawing implements were also purchased but not specifically for the purposes of the grant and are therefore not included in my final budget of $6,125.

Completing this first hand research with the help of the GS Grant allowed me the freedom to challenge many of contemporary architectural practice’s inherent assumptions about the global space it is addressing. Most impor-

tantly, the experiences of the trip, particularly those which revealed the scale at which humans are manipulating or designing around “natural” systems, led to me to rethink the architectural practice as mediated feedback system in which man constructs the imagination and space of nature that is then reciprocally constructs and is occupied by man. This way of addressing architectural practice resulted in a great deal of writing both during my trip aboard the ZIM San Francisco and subsequent to my return, influencing submissions to a journal concerned with the architectural imagination of space, and a conference on the impact of digital media on cultural and ecological space. The trip itself provided additional information to continue the development of many of the ideas explored in my masters thesis as it confirmed and expanded upon many of the assumptions made therein.

A currently ongoing project is a series of drawings/mappings that explore the overlap of jurisdictions and identities influencing life aboard the ship. For example, how does a Sri Lankan crew member relate to the Israeli corporation which owns the ship and which is registered in Malta, and managed from Germany, while only sailing between America and China? The answer to this question is part of the answer to the questions posed to the entire field of architecture at the beginning of this report and which could be considered the beginning of a cognitive mapping of global trade in the style of those proposed by Nigel Thrift and Frederic Jameson.

Building on the work of other scholars and my own research as it progresses into the future I am maintaining connections with a number of people I met throughout my travel and continuing to track a number of the containers which were aboard the ship as they circulate around the world, producing new data and narratives for future projects. Supplementing these projects are writings which I am editing, consolidating, and reworking for submission to journals and conferences, with the final goal of developing a research agenda sufficient for a PhD application. Unfortunately, lacking sufficient studio space and time, at this point in time the writing component of my work has flourished while the more traditionally architectural components such as drawing have languished. This is also partially attributed to the environment within which my research work was conducted. The time required to document my travel on the ZIM San Francisco through drawings and other representational media took away from valuable time interacting with and learning from the crew. The narrative-based information gathered from the crew has also led me to explore other methods of representation which are themselves more time based and not as reliant on concrete yet abstract information, but instead on flows, affects, and associations. This shift in my own work and the representations it relies on, is one that I believe is being undertaken by the whole of contemporary architectural practice (though at a much different pace) and has the potential to develop into a more systemic socially and environmentally conscious way of working ; reconsidering some the fundamental ways in which people currently relate to space.

The GS Grant application process and the the realization of my grant proposal required me to step outside the comfortable location and methods of traditional architectural practice and into the systems of digital-global systems. While architects are increasingly trained to understand the behavior and interaction of multiple systems, they rarely extend in scope beyond the city within which a project is built. However, with the architecturalization of everything up to the global scale of international trade, and, the number of systems that must be addressed simultaneously and their relative complexity makes finding an effective point of engagement difficult.

This difficulty is compounded when engaging with digital-global trade systems on a concrete and physical basis, rather than simply theoretically. To do so is to work against the design and flow of those systems which usually allow them to remain invisible: We are discouraged from imaging the mechanisms of required to fulfill our desires and are given over to anticipatory angst when the time between clicking “buy” on a product and its arrival veers from instantaneity. Writing the grant proposal with the intention of concretely engaging with the global system of trade required me to deeply analyze and reimagine the system in order to find an entry point that I would not have been apparent otherwise.

My re-imagination of global trade systems undertaken as part of the proposal process opened up the new my work to the questions centered on human engagement, both with the systems of digital-global trade and its

representations outlined at the beginning of this report. As part of this re-imagination I had to develop an explanatory rhetoric of words and images for use by myself and others which could support ongoing work while remaining open enough to change as I learned more through the implementation of my proposal. The rhetoric I developed was one that mixed emotional, affective, and narrative elements of individual bodies and objects with concrete and statistical information of the digital-global systems they populate to build a rich framework which could accommodate multiple scales of detail. Mirroring the changes in architectural practice to incorporate human narratives, this rhetoric interpolates objects and bodies into its language, but as a means to construct an imagination of the world as architecture that is particularized and immanent rather than totalizing and transcendent.

The GS Grant process taught me how to translate experiences and information into a compelling and open-ended structure that could adapt as it was realized; how to merge the ongoing, imprecise and evocative, with the completed, measured, and informational. Encouraging me to develop a research methodolog y that was based in challenging assumptions, receiving the GS Grant helped me move discover the epistemological limitations of the dictum “everything is architecture� and find ways to address people, objects, and relationships on their own terms. The grant process taught me to look, listen, and speak in new ways, to assume new roles, giving me the breathing space to take chances and follow pathways that were not always clear. Receiving the GS Grant was not only a validation of my previous work and encouragement to continue it, but also a safety net giving me the opportunity to push boundaries and ask new questions of myself and the practice of architecture.

Alongside ported ships. Qingdao, Shangdong, China The scale of shipping infrastructure becomes physically apparent in the imposing and moving objects of the containter terminal’s cranes high flying ballet and the mute massiveness of the ships. Wailing sirens, whirring motors, capital flow cyclically animates it all.

View from owner’s cabin during container operations. Elizabeth, New Jersey, USA Conatiners move around, seemigly weightless, form stacks that reify the intersection of capital demands and material-physical infrastructure. The complex calculus of weight and balance, port of origin, port of destination, and other requirements plays out on deck.

ZIM San Francisco port-side lifeboat. Southern Atlantic Ocean, near Hispa単ola.

Changing and overlapping oversight structures leave their mark all over the ship. The ship is owned by the Israeli company, ZIM, managed by the German company NSB Reisburo, insured in Jamaica, regesitered in Malta (formerly in Germany) all for legal convenience.

Construction of new Pacific Ocean locks on the Panama Canal. Panama City, Panama A literal Mt. Everest worth of earth is being moved to expand the canal. Nature shaped the path of the canal which is now reshaping and merging with the nature around it as the two spiral closer to each other in the totalizing anthropocene imagination of the world.

Spare metal lashing bars between deck covers aboard the ZIM San Francisco. Southern Pacific Ocean, near Puerto Vallerta Steel armatures augment human capacity and facilitate the emergent stacking behavior of the container. With minimal effort the human body is brought into the system of global trade as another piece of infrastructure, a securitizing remainder rather than essential part.

Empty containers on deck aboard the ZIM San Francisco, Southern Pacific Ocean near Isla Guadalupe The ebb and flow of containers across the deck as the ship transits between ports registers the flow of global trade. But the contents of the containers their origin, and their final destinations are unknown to all onboard. They are most useful as black boxes, capital cyphers.

Radar screens and rudder GPS headings illuminate the ZIM San Francisco brige at night. Northern Pacific Ocean, near Vancouver The entire ship operates digitally. Via satellite uplink, all the ships systems and crew member decisions are monitored by the NSB Reisburo main office in Germany. GPS systems adjust the ships course near-instantaneously. The bodies onbaord regimented on every scale.

Horizon disappears in fog off the starbord side of the ZIM San Francisco. Northern Pacific Ocean, near the Allutian Islands The digital instrumental navigaiton of ship requires so little direct human intervention that limited visibility has an effect only on the crew’s leisure activities. However, the digital systems are reactionary, not predictive, and therefore perform poorly in many situations.

A break-bulk ship prepares to leave port. Kingston, Jamaica Around the world free-ports and other trade zones follow and direct global trade. With relaxation on laws, taxation, immigration and services catered to the powers they serve, these zones supplant traditional soveriegnty with the trans-national asoveriegnty of capital.

Containers in storage awaiting transport. Kingston, Jamaica The global trade system is built upon capacity. The capacity to carry, and the capacity to anticipate. Predicting desires and mobilizing flows of materials to meet them requires massive stockpiles of unused containers and the coordination of consumer data with logistics.

Black Market product loading outside a container terminal. Shanghai, China Surrounding the spaces of global trade, and in fact, very much a part of it, informal economies of goods and services provide both a convenient overflow and justification for the trade zones in whose shadow they operate. The legitimate and illegitimate sustain each other.

ZIM San Francisco Captain Bogdan Rusu Dragos uses his smart-phone to film sea birds. Southern Pacific Ocean, near Isla Guadalupe Even at sea, mobile digital technology mediates the everyday lives of crew members. Smart-phones are the most regulated items onbaord. Prohibitions in many locations, and varying customs polcies, requires crew members to “hold� phones for each other.

A stevadore checks his smart-phone during container loading. Elizabeth, New Jersey, USA Human and ship alike are part of a digital network connecting, monitoring, regimenting, and aligning the objects comprising digtial global commerce and trade. Flows of desire, disemminated across this system, create an invisible, self-perpetuating chain of actions.

Families fish and grill outside the entrance to port security facilities. Qingdao, Shangdong, China Still other stories surround and participate in digital-global trade. The proud backdrop of photos from an industrial city, the wife who waits for her merchant-marine husband to return, the fisherman cathcing from polluted waters; anthropocene naratives all.