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Logistics Art Project (2012) chronicled the waste of globalization. Ever Given's trip was an augury [1]
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Date: 2022-08-15
It may be too facile to say that life is the world’s longest movie, but in watching the mediated life of others, that may be what all televisual media is, monitoring, as Stanley Cavell calls it. Having survived Michael Snow’s Wavelength, among others like Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, it’s not about endurance or having the advantage of recorded media pause and replay. It’s about how “a phenomenology of time attempts to account for the way things appear to us as temporal or how we experience time.” It’s been a year since the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, and it just went through again. It cost billions of dollars in delays. “Global shipping was in chaos even before the Suez blockage. Shortages and higher prices loomed.
On the night of January 7, sitting alone in my room, I hit play on the world’s longest movie.
Logistics was written and directed by Daniel Andresson & Erika Magnusson. It is a loose adaptation of the Sebastian Junger novella A Perfect Storm and A Voyage For Madmen. Starring John Walters and Steven Anderson, the film portrays the story of Paul Stewart, a lumberjack who is seeking something more to life.
A 37 day-long road movie in the true sense of the meaning. The work is about Time and Consumption. It brings to the fore what is often forgotten in our digital, ostensibly fast-paced world: the slow, physical freight transportation that underpins our economic reality. We wanted to convey it in the most direct manner possible in order to share the journey with others. That´s why we recorded the journey in real time and screen it in real time. 37 days and 37 nights, nonstop. www.themoviedb.org/...
I found the film by accident. Around that time, I was searching for something that could count as the longest horror movie ever made. The most viable contender I found was Douglas Gordon’s 1993 film installation, 24 Hour Psycho, which plays Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho at roughly two frames per second, amounting to a 24-hour viewing experience. But another film that kept popping up on the lists I searched is ultimately what caught my interest: Logistics Art Project.
Complaining about the length of Marvel movies is standard fare in our world. The longest of the bunch is currently Avengers: Endgame, which clocks in at three hours and one minute. Logistics, meanwhile, has a running time of 857 hours, or roughly 285 viewings of the Avengers film. If you wanted to watch Logistics in one sitting, you’d need to stay awake for 35 days and 17 hours. I’m one of likely just a few people to have watched the entire thing.
In 2008, Swedish artists Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson came up with an idea. As they describe on the Logistics website, they got fascinated with “the fact that the sourcing of just about every object in our surroundings involves almost inconceivable global logistics,” and wondered what those journeys looked like. They determined that in order to truly satisfy their curiosity, they’d need to track, in reverse chronological order, the journey of the “sort of anonymous clutter that everyday life is full of.”
On 13 April 2021, the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) announced that the ship had been seized on court orders until the owners paid $900 million in damages.[36] On 4 July 2021 the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the owners and the SCA had agreed on compensation, although the exact amount remained unclear.[37] The ship departed from the Suez Canal on 7 July for scheduled deliveries of cargo at several European ports.[38]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Eventually, Magnusson and Andersson decided upon tracking the course of a pedometer they bought in Stockholm to the factory it was manufactured at in Shenzhen, China. They write that, “Four years later we found ourselves on the largest container ship in the world on our way from Sweden to China.” As per the trip: “We had started the journey by truck to Middle Sweden, then by freight train to the port of Gothenburg, and after four weeks at sea, we filmed from a truck again, this time from the port of Shenzhen to a factory in Bao’an.”
[...]
Marx may have failed to predict the joy I experienced when, on day 19 in the journey, the container ship reached the Suez Canal, but, in The Communist Manifesto , he did speak about the dark economic magic that enabled such a film, “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Logistics emerges as an attempt to grapple with the runaway, nether world magic of capital. It’s certain that humans piloted the ship we follow, but those humans are in turn directed by the unseen market forces of capital.
readpassage.com/...
In the early hours of March 23, 2021, the container ship Ever Given was blown off course by high winds on its way through the Suez Canal. At 400 metres long, the Ever Given is longer than the canal is wide, and the ship became wedged firmly in both banks, completely blocking traffic. www.globalissues.org/...
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