These lines of communication, these networks, are part of what it takes to "stitch the world together". Perhaps it is in these flows of things and information that the essence of "modernity" emerges. And as Rudyard Kipling said:
Transportation is civilisation!The shipping records of the past can now be used to produce a moving image of the flows of goods, people and information, as well as monitoring the patterns of trade in our age of containerisation.
The British Empire vanished long ago, and not many people read Kipling anymore. But Conrad's world shimmers beneath the surface of our own. Today Internet cables run along the seafloor beside the old telegraph wires. Conrad's characters whisper in the ears of new generations of antiglobalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists. And there is no better emblem of globalization today than the containership, which has made transport so cheap that it's more efficient to catch a fish in Scotland, send it to China to be filleted, then send it back to Europe for sale, than it is to hire laborers in situ. Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea, which makes ships and sailors more central to the world economy than ever before.Pages 7-9, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
LODE &
ARTLINER
The LODE project was linked to the Hull based ARTLINER project. In the video documentation of the "performance of signs" and "unloading" of the "cargo of questions" the ARTLINER container is used to transport the LODE crates to the Ferens Art Gallery where it was craned from the container trailer onto the cobbled street. Yellow House then took the cargo from the container and, in procession, installed the cargo in the gallery.
