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Robot ships

This Wired piece (which reads a bit like a PR statement from Rolls Royce) tells us that autonomous systems [i.e. personless] are going to make their way into large vessels in the near future, and VTT and Rolls-Royce are already working on the first round of systems, which initially include remote controls that can be commanded […]

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London comes closer to the sea

Dubai Ports World runs London Gateway which will be competing against Felixstowe and Southampton to be the top container port in the UK.  Like many other DPW concerns, there seems to be an iron (or ham-) fisted determination to not let workers unionise – although protests seem to have stymied this effort for now. I am hoping to visit the […]

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Interconnections

Dead Water by Simon Ings is the most fabulously dystopian novel about shipping, containers, ships, airships, tsunami, shipping, and dastardly deed that can happen when vast numbers of ships are circumnavigating the globes with vast numbers of containers on board.  One of his main characters invents containers: The box does not sway, or ping, or flex, […]

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On the high seas

I am really looking forward to my trip aboard a container ship… The ship above is a liquid natural gas carrier, so it will have a different feel, but the feeling of being on the seas… It seems to be the thing to do nowadays, even by historians who don’t work on the contemporary era. […]

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Value in motion

“The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. Only in so far as the direct product can be realized […]

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The prose and poetry of toiling in/on the seas

I am ashamed to admit that I was a latecomer to the magic of Allan Sekula. Far too much of a latecomer.  I discovered his stunning work on shipping and transport, last year; he died in August last year. His amazing film Forgotten Spaces stays with you, flashes of sound, slivers of images, whole stories, the mood […]

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