Port of call: The eyeline of the logistical image

by Stephen Turner

Port of call incorporates ‘first contact’ in the colonial context of globalising modernity, which is the province of voyagers, traders, tourists, and settlers, called by the allure of the exotic, the extraction of resources, profits from plantations, and the prospect of new countries. Images of other places and peoples themselves form markets, such as the mid-nineteenth century craze for the postcard-sized carte de visite, which means ‘calling card’. Today’s calling card is online and advertorial, where the aesthetic palette of sites such as Instagram make goods, places, and people ‘destinations’. If earlier writings and images – whether journal, diary, mapping, drawing, painting, or photography – established places of ‘interest’, they also identified safe havens for ships or sites of berth, calling forth ports. Thus the truly global port was initially called for by the material and aesthetic prospects of colonial modernity.

Rather than simply a harbour, landing, location, physical structure, or even point of arrival or departure, a port is a ship’s calling. What that ‘calling’ may be, and to whom, stretches the port’s infrastructure along the logistical lines of shipping. The port’s calling card may be the site of enslavement, the ship-worker’s dock, the emigrant’s prospect, or the destination of the tourist. That calling card today stretches the port to the internet portal, providing a gateway to material opportunity, attractive lifestyles, and places of leisure. The movement of goods and people by ships is motivated by the aggregate action of the online eye, the physical site of the port and the eye-site of the portal. If this doubled movement is underpinned by the images of goods and places that appear desirable, first contact today has already been made via the portal of the internet, in which I encounter what the encounter of others has already made desirable.

‘Port’ refers to both a harbour or haven for ships, and a place of ship’s business, whereas ‘portal’ refers to a doorway or device for looking-through, including a computer port, the ‘gateway’ of the World Wide Web – internet or intranet – and the sea of data that we daily surf.^[1] Port and portal are conjoined by the traffic of images, which, with regard to the viability of ports, are inseparable from the traffic of ships. For my purposes, the logistical image does not refer to images of the movement of ships,^[2] but to the online demand of would-be consumers for desirable goods, places, and people. The logistical image is thus already an image of the historical movement and aggregation of images – a now digital imago − whose algorithmic aggregation prompts consumption, thence the transport of goods and people. Logistical images are digital knots that underpin the business of ports.

The online prompt which ‘moves’ the consumer may be the desirable Californian home décor of an influencer (#emmachamberlain) or the resort-like experience of cruise ship promotion (try YouTubing Wonder of the Seas, the flagship of Royal Caribbean International). Where the intra-structure of the image concerns the visual aesthetics of the Instagram palette or editing of the YouTube vlog, the infrastructure of the image concerns the interlinked platforms, applications, and affordances which stretch the port to the internet portal. Following the eyeline of the logistical movement that connects the two – image intrastructure and infrastructure − reconstructs the ‘port’ in the manner of digital photogrammetry: the forensic scanning of a photograph that seeks to reconstruct its real-world referent. The invisible eyeline from port to portal means that the logistical image is the ghost of the one you see. This is because no image can at the same time be an image of its online emplacement. Therein lies the port of call.

The actual port’s location at the edge of the city makes the boundaries of the city indistinct, and the city itself motile. Hence the physical port is a para-site, which is the city ‘beside’ itself. I will use para-site in the sense of a place beside itself, but also, and more deeply, as the re-doubling without end of the port in the eye of who and what it ‘calls’ – that is, the goods and consumers of a parasitical economy. In Tim Ingold’s sense of a place as a knot of crossings, or lines,^[3] the para-site of the port is a place of ingress and egress where goods and peoples cross and gather. This skein of activity both creates the port as such and is what calls for it, both calls it into being and extends it, as the ‘port’ is materialised by on and offline commerce. The interest in ports for the purposes of transporting goods, or harbour attraction for tourists, makes the online portal a digital upgrade and aggregate of the historical ‘port of call’. The digital knot created by the port’s calling in the form of online interest and activity is the logistical image – both the call of the port and the call for the port, hence what calls the port forth – a technical imago that requires para-sight. The actions of online use cannot themselves be seen, but drawing the eyelines of users makes up the logistical image, that is, an image of the logistics of their actions (the eyeline here refers to what objects, people, and places are looked at, an eye-to-hand movement, not eyeline-tracking). The ‘logistical’ image that results is the product of an aggregate function – an image of all ‘like’ images that have themselves been liked.

‘Port to portal,’ or better the port/al, includes the physical and technical infrastructure of the port and the software infrastructure of logistical media which together make up the architecture of algorithmic capitalism. For Ned Rossiter the ‘logistical city’, ‘determined by the ever-changing coordinates of supply chain capitalism’ and ‘[p]opulated by warehouses, ports, intermodal tunnels, container yards, and data centres’,^[4] is ‘elastic’, world-making, and globalising:

Logistical media − as technologies, infrastructure, and software – coordinate, capture, and control the movements of people, finance, and things. Infrastructure makes worlds. Logistics governs them.^[5]

For Rossiter the software of logistical media, and the enhanced techné of digital calculation and coordination, control and capture, parameters and protocols − the ‘logistical fantasy of seamless interoperablity’^[6] − is now pervasive and sovereign. Logistical media describes a biopolitical computational being – ‘data becomes a living entity’^[7] − that produces and corrals subjectivity, labour, and life (‘subjectivity and space, economy and time’^[8] ). In Rossiter’s instructive account, the genealogy of logistics is entwined with the ‘centrality of security for global supply chains’^[9] in the military-business-complex of the US-led Cold War period, assisted by RAND Corporation ‘total cost’ analytics. Today, this infrastructure and software (EPS, ERP, KPIs, RFID, AIS, GPS tracking, biodata, and Excel-spreadsheet)^[10] operates in the neo-colonial context of North-South supply and demand. For Rossiter, logistical systems orchestrate the movement of goods, but this economy is driven by the profitable imagery of their desirability, or desiring consumers.^[11] This makes the algorithmic aggregation of the logistical image the ‘sovereign’ of consumer economy; the aggregation of interest is what calls the port forth, driven by an enduring coloniality of desire.

Logistically, the port is both the physical infrastructure and software of its business − the key actor for Rossiter is the technical form of the data center^[12] − but it is the logistical image that drives desire. Hence the port’s calling makes it a para-site of online and offline interactivity. The integrated assembly of ships, dock, and portside machinery – hardware and software – physically locates and extends what Benjamin Bratton calls the ‘stack’, or architecture, of platform sovereignty.^[13] Thus ports manifest the political geography of a parasitical economy. That is, the stack of port infrastructure and consumer interest is thoroughly enmeshed. The activity of city and port, prospect and prospecting, blurs parasite and host, as the former absorbs the latter. Further, it is the aggregate image of logistical media that makes the operation of the stack also a surface. The logistical image more deeply describes the non-visible traffic of images, and the digital knots, or crossings, formed by the aggregate looks and likes of users – the drive of the aggregated image − which promote and disseminate desirable goods and places, and prompts the work needed to produce and service them. So the portal informs the port, and the port is the infill of the portal. The eyeline of the logistical image draws our attention to floating worlds of capital, goods, places, and people, which, from port to portal, make up a skein of parasitical consumption.

The obverse scene of the conjoined traffic of goods, places, people, and images – from port to portal – is the under-world of human work that sustains the hardware and software of traffic. Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s documentary The Forgotten Space (2010) and Sekula’s closely-related long essay ‘Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)’,^[14] which partly reflects on an essay he had written 20 years earlier, helps me to probe the inseparably human and machinic nature of work, which is strongly visualised in the port-based imagery of the film. It also prompts me to address the virtualised economy of consumption that defines and conjoins the physical site of the port and the eye-site of the portal. Sekula and Burch’s documentary is focused on the steel box of the container, its invisible goods, the movement of ships and immiseration of their crew members. Without containers, tourist ships further withhold invisible workers below deck, and the more visible above, who play a significant role in the parasitical economy that conjoins port and portal. The immiseration of work in the documentary also follows upon the insatiable desires of algorithmically-aggregated consumers (in this way my desires are haplessly enlarged and given focus by what others are also consuming). In the instance of its encounter, the port is stretched in digital space by the users of the portal, following the algorithmically-generated eyelines of other users, producing a collective eye-site, or aggregate activity, with the traffic of ships and the traffic of images related to each other by the logistical image.

‘[I]ncreasingly automated and algorithmic’, logistics, for the editors of the timely collection Assembly Codes,^[15] is

like capital itself, an inhuman, unknowable thing. Its representation in texts, photographs, and films are almost defined by the enormous structures erected in pursuit of global trade.^[16]

This is the work of what they call the ‘logistical imagination’,^[17] underpinned (it follows)  by what I call the logistical image. Moving from goods to people, working port to harbour attraction, labour to leisure, and container to tourist ships requires me to attend to the industry of port-side restaurants, shops, and attractions, exotic ports of call and their representations. The setting and denizens of today’s cruise have received ascetic and acerbic treatment, from Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010) to Rubin Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), whilst the drama above and below deck of the charter boat in the sprawling reality television series Below Deck (since 2013), and its ports of call, provides both an operational element and para-sight of the logistical image through its Instagrammed dissemination. The latter programme helps me to demonstrate the ob-scene, or underside, of entwined labour, logistics, and leisure in the global economy of desirable goods and places. Unlike the workers on container ships, the workers on tourist ships and at port-sites themselves participate in the production of the imagery of the cruise, and its construction as an object of desire. A methodological and forensic Instagrammetry of such image-work, like photogrammetry, reveals that the harbour port is defined in advance as a knot of any would-be ship’s actual movements. What ‘calls’ forth the port is an idea or object of consumption that the movement of ships will without a doubt fulfil. Here, I reconstruct the port’s logistical imagination in terms of photography, film, and television – that is, in terms of its Instagrammable outputs.

Para-site

The Forgotten Space begins with the port of Rotterdam, the largest in Europe, although it competes with Antwerp and Hamburg, and even bigger and busier ports in Asia (the invisible goods of container ships include ‘frozen cod [that] is detoured to China for low-wage fileting’). The film shows the Rotterdam port pushing into the North Sea, ‘sucking up the sea floor and producing new land’. The expanding port ‘beside’ the city is also a part of the city, and makes the port a para-site. So the city’s boundaries are blurred by the mobility of the port. It is a place of moving goods that ‘moves’ the city itself and mobilises urban agencies. All the while the port expands, the old harbour is transformed by the speculation of real estate, gentrification of housing and its make-over as heritage attraction, and place of shopping and strolling for tourists. The paralleled movement of shipping containers and ships of people, although dock worker and tourist may hardly interact, are entwined in the business of the port. A parasitical economy of the movement of capital, goods, and people emerges that hinges on the logistics of transport. The exterior sea and interior land of Rotterdam are conjoined by a transport system that includes truck, train, and barge, made all the more efficient by the 160 kilometer Betuwe line that connects the extended Maasvlatke industrial area and the European rail network (Maasvlatke 2 is currently expanding the port into the sea by 20%).^[18] The machinery of transport stretches the ‘port’, and makes it the hub of converging lines. At the core of this economy, shown by the silent repetition of the film’s signature image, is the steel box of the shipping container.^[19]

The automation of the movement of the steel box, an ‘acme of order, efficiency and global progress’ internationally standardised in the 1960s, has also made human work ‘invisible drudgery’, raising it to ‘a higher power’. Sekula and Burch are interested in who or what now does ‘work’. Automation includes the technified ‘intelligence’ of the ‘new land’ of the expanding port and its handling of goods, which is done by robot vehicles with human appendages. If human work has been refined and reduced, what humans still get to do is evermore unromantic, exacting, and arduous. In the film we meet a highly skilled port worker who operates machinery that raises steel boxes from the body of the container ship. He describes the stress of the intense focus and short shifts that this job requires. As worker and machine appear inextricable, images of the movement of vehicle and goods turn the port into an urban cyborg. With its moving parts, the ‘working port comes to resemble a child’s game, or a gangster suitcase, full of dollars’ (indeed, the workflow of the port includes official and illicit economies, making Rotterdam a premier gateway for drugs^[20]). The film shows how the remaining workers are pressured by new machinic assemblies in ways that reiterate the pressure placed on any worker by the assembly line’s incessant movement, and today’s ‘just-in-time’ delivery of goods.

The port not only exerts an automated agency, but serves up a pedagogy of digitally algorithmic consumerism. The child-like blocks of the port’s machinic elements are literalised by the play of children at a nearby Montessori school, who are seen driving toy trucks and manoeuvring boxes in a ‘spirited rehearsal of the automated future’. In their play the infrastructure of the port appears as teacher and classroom, making its urban agency an affordance, or instructive infrastructure, of consumer capitalism. It is not just that their play mimics the automated handling of containers, but that their movements are already prescribed, and have been traced in advance, by the port-based algorithmic architecture of supply-chain capitalism. The desirable objects of its gestural imprint can be constructed through surface forensics,^[21] or Instagrammetry.

If the dockside and ship workers do not know what sits inside the steel boxes of container ships, ‘plying fixed routes between producing countries and consuming countries’, the goods that the ships are transporting are the object of the global economy, and the direct result of the desiring gaze of consumers that prompts the movement of the same containers. In this regard, what is also working, or doing work, is the imagery of goods that consumers desire. This is the ‘work’ of images, which Sekula elsewhere calls their ‘traffic’.^[22] Put simply, the movement of containership is entwined with the work of imagery. That is, their movement is prompted by images of the good or better material life I might enjoy, where I might enjoy it, or what desirable goods might form part of that enjoyment, produced in far-away countries under conditions I know very little about and at increasingly cheap cost.^[23] I live in the Netherlands, but my ultra-light and warm jacket is made in Vietnam, which is at least one item that the mysterious containers hold (this list would be a long one).

The push and pull of the port-as-calling is only partially defined by its physical site. The logistics of shipping, whether movement of goods or people, is determined today by the computation of consumption, or algorithmically aggregated imagery, which mobilise and direct image flows. The entwined traffic of images and goods are defined by the logistical image. ‘Rethinking the traffic in photographs’ in his 2002 essay, Sekula fixes upon a New York Times article about the mass protest movement against the World Trade Organisation’s meeting in Seattle in 1999 (‘Shipwreck in Seattle’ by David E, Sanger, 5 December 1999), and its reference to the ‘aging cargo ship’ of pointlessly slow talks ‘in an age of email’.^[24] This passing comment leads him to reflect on the accelerated global flows of goods and images, which Paul Virilio, conjoining war and cinema, designates dromology – the englobing logics of speed.^[25] With reference to Edward Steichen’s globally circulated photographic exhibition The Family of Man (1954), still ‘the best-selling photographic book of all time’,^[26] Sekula elicits three principles that make exhibition and book propaganda for corporate globalisation and world trade:

The exhibition, with its claims to globality, its liberal humanism, its utopian aspirations for world peace through world law, can be reread now in the context of the contemporary discourse of ‘globalization,’ the discourse being advanced by the promoters of an integrated global capitalist economic system.^[27]

The gathering of world peoples in the photographic exhibition and book is ‘rife with images of aquatic immersion’,^[28] but its ‘sea of humanity’^[29] failed to depict significant post-war maritime migrancy, and reprises the freedom of the seas – a Dutch invention^[30] – and the patriotism and propaganda that disguise its surveillance: ‘the continued vigilance and command of a single global politico-military superpower … more or less exempt from any overarching concept of world law’,^[31] that is, any oversight of the self-declared exceptional nation of the United States.

My interest in para-sight below identifies the doubled sense of ‘oversight’, which also means a failure to notice something, but the all-seeing, all-knowing, one world of oversight in the first sense is mirrored in the photographic exhibition and book, much like the world exhibitions of peoples and places in metropolitan Euro-American capitals of the nineteenth century. Nor has the circulation, calculation, and profit of such imagery been consigned to the past, or to National Geographic, given the retrogressive imagining of the ‘family of man’ in contemporary works such as Jimmy Nelson’s large-scale exhibitions and heavy coffee-table books.^[32]

The reiterated tropes of such photographic work, and self-serving justification of production (‘for all of us’), occludes the enduring colonialism of the global system, and removes Indigenous people in Nelson’s case from the present, as they are ghosted by the hyper-aesthetic, repressive authenticity^[33] of their photography. The self-consciously aestheticised imagery of Nelson’s phantasmagoric immersive exhibitions^[34] and printworks suggest contemporary cartes de visite and ports of call. The journey of The Last Sentinels exhibition in Amsterdam (2022-2023) – Before They Pass Away was the title of his first book – is couched in terms of ‘tradition’, ‘identity’, and ‘nature’. Toward the end of its 40-minute duration, the kaleidoscope of mostly still-shot imagery speeds up, merging the faces of the variety of Indigenous peoples that the exhibition showcases, producing a perfectly aggregated image of colonial modernity and the logistics of speed.^[35] Such accelerated photographic exotica evokes and re-traces colonial-era tourism, from the ‘South Sea’ paradise of Tahiti to the Arabian ‘Arcadia’ of Sri Lanka.^[36]

Sekula’s theme is ghosting. Tracing the circulation of images of the world’s places and peoples as ports of photographic calling, he tells the story of the Global Mariner, sponsored by the International Transport Workers Federation, which was converted into a floating museum of shipwork. This ‘ghost ship’^[37] is the ageing cargo ship of The New York Times article, superceded by email, but also one ‘figuring within … the exhibition that was its only cargo, all the other invisible, ignored, and silent ships of the world.’^[38] Unlike the slow Global Mariner, container and bulk ships today are ‘integrated into a larger machine ensemble of dockside cranes and conveyors’,^[39] making up, for instance, the stacked urban cyborg of Rotterdam port, its sea extension and transport plug-ins. Apart from its association with unheralded and invisible ship workers, the Global Mariner raises the spectre of the zombie port for dead ships. Formerly named the Lady Rebecca, ‘owned by a Hong Kong shipping company, flagged, I believe, to Panama, crewed by Filipinos, and finally – at the literal end of her ropes – moored at offshore anchorage in the bustling port of Pusan’ ,^[40] Korea, it was to be decommissioned, or sent for ‘rendition’

to the gently sloping beaches of India, to be run ashore at high tide by a skeleton crew: engines full ahead onto the oily sand, to be broken by the sledges and cutting torches of vast crews of gaunt laborers, the abattoir of the maritime world, the ship re-manned for the last time by the last toiling victims in the cycle of oceanic exploitation.^[41] 

In Hira Nabi’s short film, All that Perishes at the Edge of Land (2019), the nearby abattoir of Gadani, Pakistan, is vividly realised as the object of such arduous and dirty work, swarming with immiserated workers who attack its main character with cutting tools. The film includes a narration by the ship of its own story, and journey, to the zombie port. Its voice provides a glimpse of the movement of ships – the plying of goods from South to North and back – that globally make up a parasitical economy.^[42]

The global ship-based economy includes the ‘infrastructural ruins’^[43] of zombie ports and media (Rossiter cites the work of Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka), ‘toxic metals, fuel,’ and the cargo of ships mothballed by the 2008 financial crisis ‘corroding into the ocean’s ecosystem.’^[44] In The Forgotten Space Sekula and Burch note that container ships use bunker oil, ‘the cheapest and dirtiest’, and most polluting. And in his account of the Global Mariner’s travels, Sekula describes ‘bulk ore carriers that mysteriously break in half’, ‘myriad Filipino passengers crammed onto decrepit ferries that capsize or burn in the Sulu Sea’, and the ‘injured seafarers and atrocious living conditions … shipwrecks, fires, and oil spills’^[45] depicted in the ship’s photographic exhibition.

By contrast, the immersive spectacle of The Family of Man, with its universalising message and ‘utopian telos of the story of humanity’,^[46] today extends to ‘a ubiquitous variety of hyper-real presentations’, including ‘aquatic theme parks’ and the ‘species-rich aquariums’ of ‘the urban waterfront leisure complex.’^[47] For Sekula, the Guggenheim Bilbao museum is a lesson in the corporate make-over of the maritime port by the technesis of design^[48] and visual aesthetics of Instagram. In his description of its ‘specular reflectivity’,^[49] Sekula irritably observes ‘the random and ubiquitous presence of shiny surfaces’, whose rippling effects make it ‘a touristic postcard’,^[50] indeed a contemporary carte de visite. The product of its aggregated image is the post-Bilbao spectacle of the must-have ‘supermuseum’ designed by a world-renowned architect. Spectacular museums themselves multiply. Through the circulation of images, reiterating the global circumnavigation of ships, the port of labour in the case of Bilbao becomes the harbour of leisure and waterfront of desire.^[51]

Para-sight

The development of a port is not just dependent on goods that a country will take in, but on tourism. Rotterdam port, as Sekula and Burch observe, is not just the site of the reception and distribution of goods, but has been removed from the refashioned harbour of the old ‘port’. The new port also contributes an experiential museum (‘FutureLand’). The work of images does not just move ships to bring goods that I desire, but also moves me to visit places whose ports call me (i.e. a port calls goods and people). A port, then, is a depot where goods gather that include puffer jackets and boatloads of tourists. The tourists are themselves puffers that ports welcome, and lead to the extension beyond city boundaries, making the city a para-site of its visitor’s consumption, whilst removing the port itself from its citizen’s purview (Los Angeles, Sekula and Burch say in The Forgotten Space, is not associated with its unnatural port, even by its inhabitants). Naturally tourists create an enhanced image of the global city that is not that of its own inhabitants, whilst the city uncomfortably transforms to match the image of these desires.

The ob-scene of capitalist transport – the underside or reversed scene of global transportation networks – thus takes in the workers of invisibilised transport, but also the workers of the rich and the leisure industry. After all, both people and goods are globally transported, even though only the latter travel freely. Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme incorporates a cruise in a philosophical detour that folds modern history and coloniality into the list of notable places and ports that make up its sections: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Naples, Barcelona. Its jarring and often discordant juxtaposition of image and sound seems random, a bewildering range of visual materials scrambled on the surface of film: an empty ship deck; CCTV footage; the ship’s dining room, disco, gym, casino, and workers; television advertising; online cat GIFs; clips of classic Hollywood film and Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin); WWII documentary images; screens, portals, and passengers, including the monologues and exchanges of recurring characters. The super-saturated ‘filminess’ of the montage is hard to see through, while a wind-blown, deck-based microphone and mixed dialogue often makes it hard to hear anything. Godard makes it deliberately difficult, as Hito Steyerl remarks in her discussion of pattern recognition,^[52] to separate signal and noise.

Unlike the workerist lens of Sekula and Burch, the entwined past and present of the ports in Godard’s Film Socialisme involves a dis-assembly of the contemporary image, or image apparatus itself, and an attention to the post-documentary migrancy of images and people (images are at work too). This dispiriting noise defies narrative voiceover and calls for ‘apophenia.’ For Steyerl, apophenia is the perception of patterns within random data, ‘such as ‘seeing faces in clouds, or on the moon.’^[53] Automated apophenia subjects us to the pattern recognition of machines, which through your name or face or ID might make you ‘legitimate’ or deny you access − a bad visibility. How not to appear suggests the value for Ned Rossiter of ‘absolute anonymity’, after Edward Snowden’s revelations of the penetrative power of the NSA machine (National Security Agency), which is ‘best approached through a tactic of overexposure and multiplication of noise’.^[54] In terms of apophenia, Steyerl associates noise with ‘dirty data’. Where the stack of the port, stretched to the portal, becomes a surface of algorithmic inscription, whose patterns are constituted by ‘indissoluble perceptual simultaneity’ (Steyerl cites Benjamin Bratton), the surface is troubled by ‘a messed up and worthless set of information’ that refuses recognition, and includes the politically illegitimate, unrecognised, or ineligible.

The random imagery of Film Socialisme suggests a para-cinema or post-cinema,^[55] as film surfaces multiply and migrate across screens and devices. ‘Film’ becomes filmy, murky, and opaque. Experimental and short forms of para-cinema, which produce effects through noisy distortion of the generic character of feature film, similarly provide audiovisual evidence of ‘dirty data’, and document the ob-scene, or underside, of entwined labour, logistics, and leisure in the global economy of desirable goods and places.^[56] As images circulate, film ceases to be a lens or window, but becomes the dirty surface of an aggregate eye (what ‘appears’ is lots of looks). Troubled by dirty data, the port of call may be reconstructed through surface forensics. For instance, what calls the migrants of Philip Scheffner’s Havarie (2016)? Found footage on YouTube makes up the entirety of this film, which draws on two minutes of film shot from the deck of the Adventure of the Seas by passenger Terry Diamond in 2012. It shows a dinghy with 13 migrants, seen from the ship, in plainly desperate circumstances in the Mediterranean sea. In filmic terms the plot is greatly thickened.

The elongated take, at 90 minutes, produces a ghostly meditative experience like Derek Jarman’s final film before his own death, the entirely blue-screen Blue (1993). In Havarie we hear the conversations of the passengers, the ship’s officers and crew, and sea patrol officers, which altogether collude and index the sea as a potential burial site.

Steyerl’s discussion of digital apophenia begins with a scrambled image from the Snowden files, labelled ‘secret’, that she describes as a ‘shimmering surface of water in the evening sun’, perhaps ‘the “sea of data” itself.’^[58] Migrants seeking refuge monstrously literalise the metaphor.^[59] Havarie confronts us with Steyerl’s political question of data management and the ‘automated apophenia’ of machinic vision: ‘Who is “signal,” and who disposable “noise?”’^[60] Whether the crew and passengers aboard Adventure of the Seas simply returned after the event to the on-board activities of their floating resort, I do not know. The dreary sadness of a cruise is memorably addressed by David Foster Wallace in ‘Shipping Out: on the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise’,^[61] which focuses not only on the empty joy of consumption and the ship itself as a ‘happiness machine’,^[62] but also the indignities heaped upon the shift workers who must meet your every desire.

More recently, the obscenity of the cruise has been portrayed in Triangle of Sadness, which satirises the uber-rich at sea. Whilst this focus detracts us from the film itself as an enjoyable object of the audience’s consumption, it does have something to say about the currency of influencers. In one striking scene, model-influencer Yaya asks model-boyfriend Carl to take a picture of her eating spaghetti on board the cruise ship. Carl explains to others at the table that Yaya is not going to actually eat the spaghetti because she is gluten-intolerant. It is just the image that she needs.

The possibility that she is herself being consumed by the image, if not the spaghetti, is raised by Steyerl:

The creature that stares at you from your plate of spaghetti and meatballs is not an amphibian beagle. It is the ubiquitous surveillance of networked image production, a form of mimetically modified intelligence that watches you in the shape of the lunch that you will Instagram in a second if it doesn’t attack you first. Imagine a world of enslaved objects remorsefully scrutinising you. Your car, your yacht, your art collection observes you with a gloomy and utterly desperate expression. You may own us, they seem to say, but we are going to inform on you. And guess what kind of creature we are going to recognise in you!^[63]

‘Influence’ is as good a word as any for the propulsion of goods and the currents of desire that fuel the economy of ship traffic. The Frankensteinian ‘creature’ may alternately be considered the algorithmic aggregation of the logistical image that manifests the port of the cruise’s calling. Steyerl’s reverse take on who or what is looking suggests the obscenity of the cruise in Triangle of Sadness and the ob-scene of its human and other-than-human agents. The sinking of the cruise ship in the film disgorges numerous workers below deck, seen earlier entertaining a rich quest ‘at request’ by diving into the sea. In a third part of the film (‘The Island’), one of these workers – the ‘toilet manager’, Abigail, played by Filipino actor Dolly de Leon – proceeds to humiliate surviving guests who make it to land by controlling access to what they can eat (they do not know how to find and prepare food). The film pictures a parasitical economy that extends to the film’s audience. As enjoyable as Triangle of Sadness may be, in the snacked-up luxurious surrounds of the Pathé cinema (Amsterdam) where I saw it, the film, too, was looking at me.

The image logistics of the cruise, including the relationships between the rich ‘guests’ and below-deck workers, is laid bare in the parasitical economy of the ever-expanding reality television franchise Below Deck, which besides the original series now includes Mediterranean and Australian variants.^[64] In Below Deck Mediterranean (2016-) the ports at which the charter boats dock (Greek islands, Split, Malta, and more) play a significant role in the series, and its appeal to a large audience. The guests are also often poorly behaved, and do their best, intentionally or not, to make the working lives of the crew a misery. Instances of obscenity abound, but for the uninitiated reader, I can suggest the ‘croissant’ episode (season 1, episode 11). In this episode, ‘second stew’ (stewardess) Julia intervenes to save a single guest’s ‘preferred’ breakfast by organising another crew member to fetch croissants from the shore. Here, the dreadful croissant works much like Steyerl’s spaghetti and meatballs, providing forensic evidence of the obscene economy that unites above and below deck. No guest’s request above deck can be denied by its workers, leading to the occasionally farcical drama that serving each individual guest their ‘preferences’ involves. The series does not just provide instructive entertainment, as its drama extends to an audience who participate by following the show’s contestants online. The ‘reality’ of the show is thus performative, as its drama is prompted and shaped by the interest of audiences in its desirable ports of call, and the imagery of them that the show and contestants both circulate.

The same episode features another significant conflict of richer and poorer, which arises between Julia and Ben over the drama of the croissant. Northern English Julia feels that her role in securing the croissant is under-appreciated by southern English Ben, and says that his indifference to her is a product of his upper-class, and indeed Eton-educated, upbringing.  The charismatic and usually cheery Ben implodes. In a confessional meltdown, he explains to ‘chief stew’ Hannah that Julia has raised issues of class and privilege that he thought he had left behind in the UK to forward his Florida-based food activities. No doubt, the operation is boosted by his frequent appearances on the Below Deck franchise, and, as of writing, his nearly one million followers on Instagram. The obverse of Ben revealed by his altercation with Julia also shows that the image of Instagrammetry extends to personality. Ben’s ‘hello darling’ bonhomie appears a make-over of self that is as filtered as Snapchat. In any case, the drama of his personal conflict will only have enhanced his reach and appeal. The workers on Below Deck mostly become experts, and more eyes, at producing content, and embracing their editing. But they must play by the rules. In the same series, party boy deckhand Danny Zureeikat has to leave the boat after taking pictures for guests and sharing them, making all-too-explicit the parasitical economy of the cruise.

RTV precisely produces patterns within the random data of human interaction, however much that interaction is shaped by the drama that its producers hope will occur. In this regard, Below Deck would appear most predictable. For instance, after each charter boat experience, with its set of guests who have usually tried everyone’s patience with unusual demands, or ‘preferences’ (another word for influence), the crew get to celebrate the achievement of seeing the guests leave the boat by going ashore and having an expensive meal at a high-end restaurant. There is abundant alcohol at this juncture, enabling the stress of the experience of guests, along with the development of conflicted relationships amongst crew members, to boil over.  Despite the predictable occurrence of crew members also behaving badly, and falling both for and out with each other, the nature of the conflicts that the program throws up, as the declining relationship between Julia and Ben proves, produces an unexpected pattern. In this way, RTV thrives on the apophenia of human interaction, the ‘dirt’ of the drama, that such programmes accrue.

Pattern (mis-)recognition identifies the port as an aggregate of consumption that stretches from television to social media, and logistically-generated likes and followers. Taken as an aggregate image, Ben’s ‘Benstogram’ includes the port in Florida which is home to the charter boat industry (Fort Lauderdale), the chef Ben Robinson and his Florida-based food work, the television series itself, and the places visited in the Mediterranean by the chartered boat in every episode, altogether an extensive range of prosumables.

Burial site

The word yacht is derived from the old Dutch word ‘jachten’, which is related to the Dutch word for ‘hunt’. The connection to yachts refers to the fast-moving small boats that wealthy Amsterdammers developed in the seventeenth century to check the merchandise of incoming ships. ‘Soon’, Evan Osnos says in his article on the super-yachts of the super-rich, which takes in the geo-political solicitude of oligarchs and rightless indignities of their ship’s workers, ‘the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe’.^[65] The word jachten perfectly brings together the colonial origins of the modern port, as site of commerce and profit, and the imagery of desirable goods, material, and even spiritual well-being that prompts the movement of ships. But it is not so much that the goods are being hunted, however much time we spend online looking for things that we might like to purchase, but that these very things ‘hunt’ us. Consumers are themselves consumed.

As an example of hunting and being hunted that speaks directly to the colonial present, I recently discovered an online site that describes ‘the 11 most secret beaches in New Zealand’, where I grew up.^[66] Eerily empty, an Indigenous presence has been parasitically disappeared, altogether overlooked and buried, by the logistical image. Rather than anything I was looking for (I cannot remember what I was looking for, although my laptop will), it is better to describe this site as having found me. I may have been seeking the seemingly empty, uninhabited, and secret spots in the Greek islands where Below Deck: Mediterranean promises its guests they will be able to enjoy a lavish lunch, set up with demanding labour by its crew. In any case, the not at all ‘secret beaches’ of New Zealand is not only hunting me, but every other person who might now turn up there, making it both an open secret, treasure hunt, and port of call.^[67] The calling card turns out to be my desire for the desire of someone else, an aggregate desire whose skein of online activity constitutes the ‘port’ which will both more and less happily receive these visitors, including myself. The online hunters of such beaches are haunted by the interest in them of the aggregate eye, and are themselves hunted.

Aotearoa (New Zealand), too, has been an object of colonial production and consumption, from nineteenth-century photographic tourism and cartes de visite to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and the Regent cruise line’s Seven Seas Explorer.  Its ports of call are also the product of logistical imagining. Across the inter-related aggregate imagery of photography, film, and television, I detect a pattern of colonial (mis-)recognition. I see, enjoy, and consume what has been seen and enjoyed before, and has thereby been made consumable, not just the product of the port that calls, but a colonial desire that produces the calling port. Conducting a forensics of Instagrammable imagery, and its portrait of a consumer, such as myself, reveals the historical port in its traffic of goods and bodies to be a crime scene.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors of this journal and the reader of the article for their most helpful comments and suggestions.

 Author

Stephen Turner teaches in the Media and Culture programme at the University of Amsterdam. His publications address writing and digital technologies, geo-media in settler-colonial contexts, including painting, photography and film, and built pedagogy and critical university studies. He has co-edited Other People’s Country: Law, Water and Entitlement in Settler Colonial Sites (Oxon-New York: Routledge, 2019) with Tim Neale, and is currently completing a book with Sean Sturm about the university and dissent. His art writing addresses projects by artists Ann Shelton and Dane Mitchell.

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[1] See https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/portal (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[2] See https://www.marinetraffic.com/; https://www.shipmap.org/ (University College London Energy Institute [2016]0; and, underpinned by the oil economy, https://www.oilmap.xyz/ (accessed on 1 February 2023). Thanks to research by Alireza Rabiel Kenari.

[3] Ingold 2007.

[4] Rossiter 2016, p.  xiii.

[5] Ibid., p. 4-5.

[6] Ibid., p. xvii.

[7] Ibid., p. xiii.

[8] Ibid., p. 4.

[9] Ibid., p. 14.

[10] Ibid.; Enterprise Planning Software (EPS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Radio Frequency Indentification (RFID), Automatic Identification System (AIS), Global Positioning System (GPS).

[11] Rossiter 2016 remarks in passing on the aggregated online activity that I take to be central to the virtualised economy of algorithmic capitalism. Indeed, ‘[o]ur tastes are calibrated and relayed back to us based on the aggregation of personal history coupled with the distribution of desire across sampled populations’ (p. viii). Thus ‘economies of data-mining profit from the aggregation of the seemingly inane activity of users clicking from one side to the next, or from the accumulation of the trivial taste on social networking sites’ (p. 17). Tastes may be trivial but their aggregate accumulation consolidates the sovereign power of the logistical image.

[12] Ibid., p. 20.

[13] Bratton 2016.

[14] Sukula 2002.

[15] Hokenberry et al. 2021.

[16] Ibid., p. 5.

[17] Ibid., p. 4ff.

[18] See https://www.portofrotterdam.com/nl/bouwen-aan-de-haven/lopende-projecten/maasvlakte-2 (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[19] See key works on the revolution of containerisation by Levinson 2006 and Klose 2015.

[20] Boztas 2022.

[21] This term was generated by the Materialities and Surfaces group in the Research Masters programme of the University of Amsterdam: Celandine Seuren, Dhriti Kamath, Stefan Glowacki, and Elia Meregalli.

[22] Sekula 2002.

[23] As Jill Glessing remarks in a review of The Forgotten Space, the effects of containerisation and ‘the flag of convenience’ are well-known: ‘underpaid and overworked workers in unregulated poor countries producing and transporting cheap consumer goods to wealthy countries; and their displaced unemployed cousins in richer countries, left abandoned by corporations in their race to the bottom for the lowest wage’ (2010, p. 62).

[24] Sekula 2002, p. 6.

[25] Virilio 2006.

[26] Sekula 2002, p. 4.

[27] Ibid., p. 21.

[28] Ibid., p. 22.

[29] Ibid., p. 24.

[30] With regard to the ‘free seas’ doctrine, and its implications for the modern conception of oceanic space and resources, see Hessler 2019, especially ‘The Ocean as Place and Space’, pp. 129-145.

[31] Sekula 2002, p. 22.

[32] See the works of British but Amsterdam-based Jimmy Nelson at https://www.jimmynelson.com

[33] Wolfe 2006.

[34] See Nelson’s most recent exhibition, The Last Sentinels, Heroes, from near and far, at Fabrique Lumières, Amsterdam (2022):  https://www.fabrique-lumieres.com/nl/last-sentinels-heroes-near-and-far (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[35] Virilio 2006.

[36] See Iyer 2023.

[37] Sekula 2002, p. 28.

[38] Ibid., p. 31.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid., p. 29.

[41] Ibid., p. 30.

[42] https://vimeo.com/480723810 (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[43] Rossiter 2016, p. 189.

[44] Ibid., p. 2.

[45] Sekula, p. 34.

[46] Ibid, p. 22.

[47] Ibid., p. 32.

[48] Sekula 2002 remarks that ‘for Norman Forster, as for Gehry, the main breakthrough at the level of architectural practice is the collapse of the laborious mediation between drawing and executed design’, making the Bilbao Guggenheim ‘a monument to the absolute hegemony of intellectual labor afforded by computer-based manufacturing’ (p. 20).

[49] Sekula 2002, p. 20.

[50] Ibid., p. 21.

[51] There is perhaps no better example of the Instagrammable waterfront than the Doha Corniche, fashioned for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The World Cup also threw up a disposable stadium built out of shipping containers (Stadium 974), which literalises the relation that the logistical image defines between the stack and surface of port and portal, as the port of work and immiserated labour in this case becomes a spectacle building of sport. https://www.qatar2022.qa/en/tournament/stadiums (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[52] Steyerl 2016.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Rossiter 2016, p. xvii.

[55] Michael Peters 2012 discusses post-digital Godard and the possible ‘end of film’ in Film Socialisme.

[56] See, for instance, the short works, A Moon Man Made of Iron/Una luna de hierro (Francisco Rodriguez, 2017), and Blue Mantle (Rebecca Myers, 2010).

[57] https://german-documentaries.de/en_EN/films/havarie.9898 (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[58] Steyerl 2016.

[59] For an examination of the big data activist work of the Migrants’ Files, see Leurs 2018.

[60] Steyerl 2016.

[61] Wallace 1996, later renamed and reprinted as the title essay of Wallace 2009.

[62] ‘The Happiness Machine’ is a 1957 short story by Ray Bradbury that has since its publication spawned interest in the possibility of an AI version.

[63] Steyerl 2016.

[64] The full franchise to date: Below Deck (2011-), Below Deck Mediterranean (2016-), Below Deck Sailing Yacht (2020-), Below Deck Down Under (2022-), and Below Deck Adventure (2022-).

[65] Osnos 2002, p. 18.

[66] 11 most beautiful secret beaches in New Zealand: https://theculturetrip.com/pacific/new-zealand/articles/11-beautiful-secret-beaches-in-new-zealand/ (accessed on 1 February 2023)

[67] Artist Natacha Mahieu demonstrates this logic in her stop-motion capture of ever more popular tourist sites, driven by Instagram, re-creating the dirty data of the spare holiday destination aesthetic (i.e. ‘as if I were really the only person here’). https://www.natachademahieu.com/portfolio/G0000YBICEpl8j10 (accessed on 1 February 2023)