THE PORT IS THE STORM

STATEMENT

Ninety percent of all materials and goods come by way of shipping, yet the average consumer does not view the sea as a place of industry and intricate economic systems. We are “sea blind.” This term, coined by the First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, speaks of western culture’s shift in view from the sea to the sky since the Jet Age. This project hinges heavily on this term, as I feel our view has not only been moved to the sky via the abundance of air travel. We are deliberately prevented from seeing the operations of the shipping industry. Without rounded knowledge of this industry, we are at risk economically, politically and environmentally. We rely fully on shipping to facilitate our consumer/ growth economy, yet if shipping systems fail, so does the global economy. Addressing “sea blindness” is the core of making tangible the massive scale and complex systems that support it.

In March 2009, Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, the First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff for Britain’s Royal Navy first used the term “sea blindness” to address the current state of military strategies used by industrial western countries. In this, Band is not only describing military concerns, he is referring to the general shift in perspective: from the sea to the sky. “Sea blindness” is a well-suited term for our collective myopic view of the marine environment and economy.

The global shipping industry’s yearly revenue is 500 billion dollars, more than the entire airline industry combined. Maersk, for example, is the largest shipping company on the market and is comparable in size to Microsoft. Yet, we know almost nothing about how they conduct their business. Shipping companies are highly illusive, mostly private (in ownership and accessibility), and have found profitable ways to fly under the public’s radar and dodge international government regulations.

The size of the shipping industry is too large to truly comprehend. It is so vast, it has become invisible. Without shipping, our growth-based economies would crumble. Addressing the shipping industry’s role in our global economy and modern life is the core of The Port is the Storm. Here, the project’s initiative is to make the immense scale of this industry visible and tangible in order to cure “sea blindness.”

The project is a large-scale painting installation consisting of four large canvases and a large sculpture of a floating shipping container. These containers revolutionized our economy and are one of the most influential designs of modern life. The shipping container sculpture is made to look like a digital rendering of the standardized metal box. I has been constructed to be half the size of an actual container and is shaped to appear as if it is floating at the water’s (or ground’s) surface. The sculpture is designed to be a “flat pack” product. Held together with framing hardware, it can be dismantled and stored (or shipped) in flat panels of wood.

The four canvases (each measuring 97.5 x 49.5”) are roughly following the same proportions as a 20 foot shipping container, which helps repeat the standardized system of containerization. Everything is the same height and width so it is easily stackable. These paintings are organized two-by-two, with one stacked on top of the other. Each set of canvases are joined along the short side with heavy-duty hardware. This makes the canvases modular and mimics the hardware used on shipping containers.

The canvases are painted with four scenes (similar to establishing cinematic shots) that are meant to read like a visual essay on four main elements of the shipping industry. The titles of the works are based on 19th and 20th century European genre prints of fox-hunting scenes.

“Breaking Cover: Lost for a while in the home of the rain”

This painting is a broad, graphic seascape and is meant to the convey the vastness of the High Seas (everything beyond the Exclusive Economic Zone).

“The Meet: Futureland”

This painting is an arial view of a container port, showing the coded systems of shipping companies and logistic systems (or ocean systems management). Futureland refers to the area within the Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands zoned for container ships.

“Full Cry: Flags of Convenience”

This canvas shows the branding of the industry as well as the controversial use of Flags of Convenience (when a shipping company leases the use of another country’s sovereign flag, different from its port of call).

“The Death: I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger... This is the wheel I just invented / to roll through the rest of my life / I say / touching my finger to my tongue.”

This painting is a glimpse at what happens when the system fails. Here, the view shifts, showing a wreckage. The second part of the title is quoted from Billy Collins’ poem, Design.

SUPPORTING RESEARCH

Containerization

The more we ship, the less it costs. Today, the turnaround for a ship in port has been streamlined to take just a few hours, rather than the weeks it used to take with break- bulk cargo. In the 1960s and 70s, transport costs dropped rapidly with the introduction of the standardized shipping container and automated logistical management technologies. It became more cost-effective and profitable to ship labor and manufacturing overseas.

Triple-E is the new type of ship on the market for the industry (like Maersk Line’s CV Emma Maersk). It is 400 meters long (the size of 4 soccer fields) and holds 18,000 full- size 40-ft containers. In comparison, the Titanic was 270 meters long. These ships can hold 10 Airbus 320s in a row or the Eiffel Tower. If you were to line up all 18,000 containers, the snake line would be 120 kilometers long. If all those containers were loaded up onto trucks, the line of traffic would span 60 miles.

Only the sender and the receiver know the true contents of a shipping container. The information shipping companies gather for manifests only tells the sender/point of origin, the receiver/destination, the weight, and maybe a brief description of contents. Containers are sealed. Shipping containers are, unfortunately, perfect for bypassing embargoes, transporting weapons, drugs and human trafficking. Over half of all illegal goods are transported via shipping container. Only two percent of all containers are inspected by Port Authorities. In the US, the law is to check one hundred percent of all containers, but this is a flawed system. It is up to the Port and the shipping companies to comply. Most of the time, they close their eyes and hope nothing bad becomes of it, all in the name of profits.

Flags of Convenience

Shipping companies are allowed to vanish from their home port’s jurisdiction and bypass laws by using what are called “flags of convenience.” All ships navigating the

high seas beyond the Exclusive Economic Zone are required to fly a sovereign flag. Whatever flag is being used, the ship must obey those laws and is the responsibility of that country. The majority of the global shipping industry’s fleet have home ports based in Germany, Greece, China and Japan. Yet, Panama, The Marshall Islands, Mongolia and Liberia share the majority of flags flying on the high seas. They even have “flags of convenience fairs” where these countries market, compete and sell the use of their country’s flags. Deals are made (lowest tax and labor rates, who gets to cut the cue line at the Panama Canal?), countries engage in bidding wars, etc.

By slipping away from their countries of origin, they are rewarded greatly. This maneuvering around social and environmental responsibility (labor laws, wages, environmental protection), technological regulations (licensing, carbon emissions, waste disposal), and taxes, in extreme cases, reduces the cost of shipping by sixty-five percent for the shipping companies.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a branch of the United Nations (UN) in charge of regulating the shipping industry. The IMO is funded by its member states and ranks funding priority by the size of a nations’ fleet. Panama represents the most ships and is therefor the top contributor. Panama also has the Panama Canal, a major playing card, which it uses to sell use of its sovereign flag. This illustrates how the IMO suffers from a blatant conflict of interest from the top down. Even though there is good intention, the top-down funding disables any new regulation from dispersing the industry’s power.

Human Element

“There are three kinds of people: the living, the dead, and those who go to sea.”

The average worker spends nine to ten months per year at sea, with up to five weeks between ports and only two hours off-ship when in port . Only twelve percent of the workforce has access to the internet or telephone communication. The average container ship only has a crew of around twenty, all of which speak different languages and are from all over the world. In comparison, a large US Navy vessel has a crew of more than a thousand. The workday on a container ship is typically between twelve to fifteen hours long. As a result, seafarers’ long hours, isolation and lack of sleep end up causing sixty percent of all accidents due to human error. Every year, an average of two thousand seafarers die on the job, making this the second most dangerous occupation, with the first being commercial fishing.

Environmental Impact

The engines of large vessels are designs to be “omnivorous,” meaning they can run on anything that is combustable: from gasoline to tar sludge. An average sized container ship burns around 200 tons of fuel per day, so naturally they go for the cheap stuff: Bunker Fuel. Bunker Fuel is 2-3 times cheaper than clean-burning fuel sources and is made from the dregs of refineries. Technically speaking, it is residual fuel oil and industrial waste. In turn, the shipping industry is a huge source for the disposal of residual fuel and used oil. If the ships didn’t burn it, it would be trashed. Bunker Fuel is extremely high in particulates, carbon, and sulfur.

What happens when this fuel is burned at this scale? The carbon footprint of the 15-20 largest ships is equal all the cars currently in use on the planet, yet the automotive industry is the focus of public scrutiny. Bare in mind, that is only the top 15-20 ships. There are over 600 full-size cargo ships in use. In total, the black carbon emissions of the shipping company makes up four percent of the world’s total. This is roughly the same as Japan or Germany.

There are between 110-122 shipwrecks of vessels over 300 tons a year. That is one wreck every three days. Most ships wrecked are not well maintained and pushed to the limit (75% of wrecked ships are twenty-five years or older). Half of the global fleet is made up of tankers. So, 55-60 of wrecked ships are carrying volumes of fuel/oil, which means most oil spills occur on the high seas, far away from the public eye.

150,000 tons of crude oil pollutes our oceans every year. We typically only hear about oil spills near/on shore because they are immediately detectible impossible to hide. “Invisible oil spills” happen every day as a result from degassing, cleaning of engines, bilges, the hold, and so on. Globally, shipping causes 1.8 million tons of pollution per year.

When ships aren’t fully loaded, they pump in water to their ballast tanks to ensure stability offshore. Once the vessel becomes fully loaded again at the next port, this water is dumped - usually thousands of miles from where it was taken on. This water carries living creatures/organisms/parasites (invasive species), and pollutants. This frequent bio-transplantation and communication between different habitats is one of the most damaging effects shipping has on the environment.

Engines are bolted and welded to the massive hulls of ships, which act like drums. The mechanical noise transfers long distances at low frequencies. If you were to convert the decibel levels to be equivalent as they are for marine animals, you would be required to wear ear protection. This is the main cause for mass beachings of whales and low mating rates as the noise disables their ability to navigate, locate and communicate. Our use of the marine environment has reduced the acoustic habitat by 90%. (includes sonar) for marine mammals.

The Opening of the North Passage

The average lifespan of a cargo ship is thirty years. At this point, ships are typically sold to scrap metal “ship breakers” in India or Bangladesh to be stripped for recyclable materials like iron, copper, and steel. This practice is the dirtiest and deadliest job of them all. The IMO believes sustainability intervention with existing vessels is too big of an undertaking to be successful. So, theoretically, we will not see significant changes to the shipping industry until the 2050’s, when the majority of vessels are replaced.

Teddy Roosevelt’s initiative to build the Panama Canal from 1903-1914 was a major advancement for shipping. Today, ships can sail the North East and North West Passages for 25-30 days out of the year. In 20 years, it is estimated that the Passages will be navigable for 120-130 days a year. By 2050, the passage will be open year- round. We are losing ice at a rate of 37,000 square kilometers per year.

If the Northern Passages are open more to the shipping industry, it will cut distances and costs by three for major Asian and European shipping companies. It will also have massive political and economical effects (the Panama and Suez Canals will lose their power). In an odd twist, shipping’s pollution will help open the Northern Passages, allowing the transport of even more goods for less cost, creating even more pollution. Using the Northern Passage would cut trips down by days, would save $300,000 per voyage in fuel costs (and that’s the cheap stuff, Bunker Fuel), and would avoid pirate infested waters of the Gulf of Aiden and the Indian Ocean.

List of Exhibited Works

The Port is the Storm (2017) Acrylic, latex on panel, 96 x 48.5 x 23”

The Meet: Futureland (2017), flashe, acrylic and oil on canvas 49.5 x 97.5”

Breaking Cover: Lost for a while in the home of the rain (2017), flashe, acrylic and oil on canvas, 49.5 x 97.5”

Full Cry: Flags of Convenience (2017), flashe, acrylic and oil on canvas, 49.5 x 97.5”

The Death: I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger... This is the wheel I just invented / to roll through the rest of my life / I say / touching my finger to my tongue. (2017), flashe, acrylic and oil on canvas, 49.5 x 97.5”

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