Shipping Tales
The sea has always been the plasma that connects distant lands with stories of otherness, mythic voyages, the monsters of the deep and the travel into the unknown. In recent years however the shipping industry has stripped back the mysteries of the sea to a landscape of economy and efficiency. In 2014 the sea is established as an autonomous territory, a state whose border is our own visual horizon, to be inhabited by nomadic radar spoofs and sonar anomalies that disrupt the efficiencies of high frequency shipping lanes. The borders between known and unknown now play out within our instruments of perception. The radar and sonar, the very instruments that are used for mapping and quantifying the ocean are played against themselves to become sites where the mythic can start to re-emerge.The shipping routes are revised to include floating islands of free trade and the sea as a state begins to instigate tales of its own mystery. With each new shipping route, the threshold between what is known versus unknown is redefined. The new stories of the Blue State are essentially the stories of the edge of the world.
A journey through one of the new routes of the Blue State. The journey starts from Shanghai, China and ends in Los Angeles, USA.
CMA CGM Andromeda follows the shipping lanes and seeks the Foundlands in order to exchange goods. On route she encounters sights of mythical apparitions within the radar and the sonar. The spectral anomalies only appear within the State whose jurisdiction extents to the limit of the horizon.
In 2014 the Blue State is established as an autonomous territory. It does so to foster a new form of stewardship over the largest area on the planet. The border of the state is the horizon, the last moment that a ship has a viewing on land. As visibility conditions fluctuate with the weather, the border is delivered daily as a weather forecast.
