bigger than before (2021)
A ship the size of a city gets stuck in a canal and has to be rescued by the moon; over 3000 miles away, a city terraformed by canals plays host to artists exploring virtual worlds with seemingly no horizon. ‘Bigger Than Before’ is a performance lecture which explores how size, heft, and bulk sit with what we expect from technology. From infrastructural sublimes, to the urge to seamlessly scale, to queer desire and the positions that we see the world from, this performance explores power and queerness in the realm of digital space.
On 23 March 2021, the Ever Given container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal. Travelling westwards from Malaysia, the ship was buffeted by strong seasonal gusts of hot air – the khamaseen winds. The Ever Given was already travelling too swiftly for a vessel of its size in the canal, belting through the waterway to try to move through the wind rather than be blown off-course. At around 7:39 am, having been gradually pushed by the winds towards the east bank of the canal, the ship attempted to readjust, over-correcting as it did and suddenly moved westwards, displacing water as it swerved. The ship was stuck and the Suez Canal – abutment to the flow of global supply chains – was blocked.
The first news of the Ever Given’s grounding was through social media via an image taken from the Marine Traffic site. As the event was confirmed and news reports started to investigate the implications for global supply chains, the photos from Egypt began to arrive: a shot from above – the satellite image version of Marine Traffic’s diagram, the sandbanks yellow and the ship a blocky Lego construct; and then, a photo taken from the ship stuck behind the Ever Given, which gave a sense of the heft of the thing, shipping containers as small as Lego bricks.. As swallows migrate south for the winter, so memes follow popular news stories, and the Ever Given was a memetic gold mine. Some memes focused on supply chains; one compared Marine Traffic images of the ships flowing through the Suez with their movement around the Cape of Good Hope with the motto REJECT MODERNITY / EMBRACE TRADITION. Through this, the images which felt to me as though they carried the strongest resonance were those first two, of the ship itself stuck sideways, and the excavator trying to free it. They became extraordinarily popular templates for memes that had nothing to do with a crisis in global shipping but instead responded to the extremes of scale at play.
Scale is an aspiration; a fetish; impossible to convey neutrally with numbers alone and yet spills into hyperbole and drama in the poetics of description. It is a horrifying desire; something which can be kept at arm’s length through an image or diagram but which, in person, can kill or maim the observer. In a digital age, scale is everywhere and no-where: digital tools allow anything to be scaled up or down, or software updates shipped to millions of devices in one push. Where are these extremes of scale kept safely within the the screen, and where do they slip the leash into the material world? And is there even any difference?
Originally conceived as an in-person performance, the form of Bigger Than Before adapted over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic to a digital work which interrogated the space and perception of online spaces, and the emotions of comprehending something gigantic through a small screen.
Multimedia performance (20 minutes) Commissioned for the Rainbow’s End Festival, by Creative Coding Utrecht.