N07:
This is not to say that the project was doomed or that the threads it picks up are not those upon which sensible developments into the future will be built. Clean transport along inland waterways will be important as we move into a post-fossil future. This project has acted as a nail upon which to tie a number of threads that connect to models of being and doing; work and materials and food and logistics. As we see on the south west block on the map, images arise of possible futures. The prefiguration of such futures through action has left us with a different and hopefully valuable sense of possibility. This work is about experiential futures and futures literacy, and about recognising that the ways we live in the future will be different. This particular experience reflects how it might be different, but not about how it will be different. That is the job of all of us.
How do we want our world to feel?
S09:
Speculative images of river freighter electric-sail shipping communities arise, a wealth of suggestions, interweaving historical notes and future possibilities.
After a night on the leash, re-charging their batteries as well as their bodies, the wind rises just before dawn and the small crews take in their lines, both mooring and charging, to head off to the next harbour. With almost silent electric motors turning, sails are raised to use the wind to their advantage, the crews bid one another a good trip as they head off. Cargo bicycles await them at the next harbour where appropriately sized mini-containers are unloaded for local delivery. At times the solar surfaces and sails recharge the batteries almost as fast as they are being emptied by transport, the good skippers balance speed, reliability and resources to the river, the cargo and their minimal crews. The job of running freight on the river is not just about huge motors and tight time schedules, but rather a subtle interplay of energies, currents, wind and human factors. It is a dance, improvised and choreographed, upon natural and societal flows.
Perhaps there are connections back to a past that is barely remembered (Stimper 1998). As the age of the sailing barge came to an end, with motors replacing sails and the reliability and exactness of scheduling that they enabled becoming normal and even expected, it became clear that sailing craft had to work in close relationship with the weather and the tides as opposed to the forced power of diesel motors. There is an old paragraph, relating a simple story of some barges waiting out a storm, as they cannot just plough through the wind and waves (Conrad 1902), but instead must work in harmony with the natural forces. The dawn breaks, the winds and tide are favourable, the barges begin to move off. With a cup of tea in hand, the author notices in passing that several thousand tons of cargo are on the move, with barely a sound.
How would such a river feel?
References
Bey, Hakim. 1991. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. (New York: Autonomedia)
Candy, Stuart. 2017. NurturePod (artwork)
Clarke, Arthur. C. 1962. Profiles of the future: An enquiry into the limits of the possible. (London: Gollancz)
Conrad, Joseph. 1902. Typhoon. (Putnam)
FoAM, Heath Bunting and An Mertens. 2012. Identity Bureau: Legal Identity for Trees (workshop) https://fo.am/events/identity-bureau/
Foucault, Michael. 1968. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Translation of ‘Des Espaces Autres’. 1967. Diacritics, Vol.16 No.1: 22-27
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996. ‘Queer(y)ing Capitalist Organisation’. Organisation, Vol.3 No.4: 541-545 https://doi.org/10.1177/135050849634011 Accessed Sept 2023.
Gibson, Katherine and Kate Rich. 2015. ‘Feral trade: taking back markets for people and the planet’.Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, Vol.1. https://unlikely.net.au/issue-1/feral-trade Accessed August 2023.
Helmer, Veit. 1999. Tuvalu (film), (Buena Vista international).
Keynes, John Maynard. 1923. Tract on Monetary Reform. (London: MacMillan).
Kuzmanovic, Maja, Tina Auer, Nik Gaffney and Tim Boykett. 2019.‘Making Things Physical’, Journal of Futures Studies, Vol.23 No.4: 105-116.
Miller, Riel (ed). 2018. Transforming the Future; Anticipation in the 21st Century (London: Routledge)
Papadopoulos, Georgios. 2021. Cutting up, short-circuiting and accelerating economic discourse; towards a x-disciplinary economics. X-disciplinary Congress on Artistic Research and Related Matters (Vilnius Academy of Arts)
Porteous, Richard Sydney. 1966. ‘Quite a Blow’, South Pacific Adventure. (Melbourne: Sun Books)
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2006. Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp
Schaper Rinkel, Petra. 2020. Fünf Prinzipien für die Utopien von Morgen. (Vienna, Picus Verlag)
Simper, Robert. 1998. In Search of Sail. (London: Creekside Publishing)
Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby. 2020. How to Future. (London: Kogan Page)
Sterling, Bruce. 2009. Keynote at Transmediale 10, FUTURITY NOW! (House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin)
Superflux. 2017. Mitigation of Shock (Artwork)
Time's Up. 2012. Control of the Commons (Artwork)
Time's Up. 2017. Turnton Docklands (Artwork)
Time's Up. 2023. Futures Brought to Life: We are No Futurists. (Vienna: Die Angewandte)
Tsing, Anne Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press)
Xygalatas, Dmitris. 2022. What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature. Sapiens Magazine. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/cargo-cult-rituals/ Accessed November 2023.
Please continue at N01.
N06:
This project and these journeys felt, and in retrospect, feel, more and more like a Heterotopia. Introduced by Michel Foucault in a talk in 1967, the concept of a heterotopia has been developed in many ways in the fields of the arts and architecture, the sociologies of class relations and the processes of education. Whereas a utopia is a non-place that acts as a direction finder (Schaper Rinkel 2019), heterotopia has a more ambiguous, ambitious and disturbed role. Utopias are fundamentally unreal places, in the same way that Up or Forward is. Heterotopias are real places, isolated, concentrated and incompatible. A heterotopia is a physical example, flawed, inconsistent and temporary as it might be, it is filled with details of implementation, unlike the abstract, and even mathematical, theoretical considerations of utopia. The prefix hetero-, difference, is more about the oppositional character of a place, and is thus fundamentally about a real site that is ‘hetero,’ i.e., different, to other sites in culture, and different in itself. While the claim that ships are fundamentally heterotopic and civilisations without boats are without dreams (Foucault 1968: p. 27) has led to spurious uses of the term, we like to think that perhaps there is something usefully heterotopic about this project.
The six principles of heterotopias are outlined in the navigational notes. These principles help us recognise and dissect properties and nuances of heterotopic spaces.
Foucault’s fourth principle of heterotopias refers to the time-slice nature of a heterotopia. There is a beginning and an end to the temporal extension of the process of being on the water. Almost as if a temporary autonomous zone (Bey 1991) is opened up; or at least as temporary oppositional zone. The boat is isolated, as it floats upon the waters, almost atemporal, but also fundamentally absolutely temporal, not eternal, as it must dock eventually. An image of the boat on the water could be taken in almost any period from the past or future. The project is not imagined as a pilot for the creation of a river-based enterprise that will continue to expand into the indefinite future, but rather as a temporary incursion into the workings of the river and the logistics chains it produces. In spite of the sustainable practices which it embodies, the project is supremely unsustainable in itself, it can only be a time-bounded exploration of possibility; a usage that allies closely with Petra Schaper Rinkel’s (2019) imaginations of Utopias as Experimentalsysteme, a term used by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2006), that allows and supports exploring the internal logics of experimental assemblies.
The most heterotopic aspects of the project lie in connections to the third principle. This principle speaks about the property of internal heterogeneity, the juxtaposition of a number of various incompatible spaces into one space. The project was ‘about’ logistics and the transport of foodstuffs. The vessel is fundamentally too small to be ‘useful’ as transport in contemporary society. The speed of delivery is out of kilter with our contemporary ‘Just in Time’ overnight delivery attitude and expectation. The venture cannot turn a profit and is fundamentally unsustainable in the business sense. The economics are essentially queer(y)ed. Sailing on the Danube is deeply anathemic to modalities of movement on the waterway. As an arts-based research process, these journeys resembled theatre; as a way to take several sites that are themselves incompatible and to juxtapose them onto one site. As art, it is not expected that the process will make money or even ‘work’ in any sense that is required for outside social systems. As a research process, it has its own logic, with threads drawn from multifarious parts of society, but essentially in opposition to them at the same time. Imagining it as performance, there is no audience. Imagining it as a commercial pilot project, there is no planned expansion.
The heterotopia of this project contains the inverses and subversions of its own implicit intentions. Binding these antagonisms together, we critique our own action, not by inaction but by carrying on regardless of futility.
The process is itself part of the exclusionary, the system of opening and closing that is the fifth principle of heterotopias. The heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space, even when it appears on the public space of the river, inviting the arts of noticing. It abides within all the correct legalities that apply, with the vessel commercially registered (itself an almost theatrical performance) and the crew appropriately licensed. The crew must be qualified, the boat must be registered, there are hurdles to accessing the river space despite the fact that it is public and completely visible.
We are led to reflect upon the sixth trait of heterotopias relating to questions of how the project has ‘a function to all the space that remains’ (Foucault 1968: p. 27) The space of the vessel reflects its connections to everywhere. From the numerals on the hull of the vessel that reflect the connection to a database of all commercial and recreational vessels operating in Austria, to the batteries as a disconnected store of energy absorbed from the ubiquitous electrical grid. We are invited to imagine that the vessel reflects and exposes every real space. Perhaps as a piece of mobile autonomous infrastructure it does reflect and expose all those spaces from which it is temporarily disconnected but soon will reconnect, from the regular inspections to maintain licensing, to the charging of batteries after a long battle against the currents of the Danube.
Perceiving the project as heterotopic we are led to see it in connection and in abstraction, in relation and in disconnection. The situation is real, it is physically and legally existent and coherent, yet fundamentally flawed. It does not indicate or allocate blame, nor raise a righteous finger in admonishment, but rather attempts to create the impossible as an exploration of what that impossibility actually maintains (Clarke 1962). Thus, it sheds light in valuable directions.
S08:
The times required begin to play a role here too. The van would be finished with this journey in a bit more than half an hour each way. The NEV has a much lower speed and would require (if legally possible) about an hour each way. The boat requires around 4.5 hours upstream, 1.5 hours downstream. Plus, the time to get through the lock at Ottensheim, which can be (and has been) anywhere from fifteen minutes to over two hours. In terms of paying an employee to drive the boat, this makes a significant difference. If the project was driven by self-employed exploration, perhaps these times are less relevant. Waiting times must not be dead times. But as we are already imagining, we are speculating, what other changes in working practices might have co-evolved with the situation that allows or even encourages clean cargo on the Danube?
Life on the water has always been romantic, with the expression ‘running away to sea’ akin to ‘running away with the circus’ in terms of childhood dreams. With a change away from focus on individual wealth accumulation, to post-neoliberal economics, such a life running a small freight ship might be feasible. With Universal Basic Income covering sustenance or Universal Basic Services covering necessities, the possibility to live and work on the water could be attractive and feasible, the expenses of personnel becoming less of a financial burden. Speculations as to the world in which this could be real would need factors like these to make this way of life feasible, the perambulations of a tramp, electro-sailor on the inland waterways.
Scenario: What is a futures context in which this could even begin to make some kind of sense?
Primarily it presupposes a lack of fossil fuels as a transport energy source. The difference in carrying capacity of fuel driven and wind driven cargo vessels is immense. Diesel powered Danube barges are often up to 95 meters long and carry in excess of 2000 tonnes. Pushed convoys can be twice as long, twice as wide and carry four times this weight. The largest river-based sailing barges in the UK and the Netherlands were 27 meters long with a capacity of over 200 tonnes. These were not battling the incessant flow of the Danube in the regions where it is technically still a mountain stream.
There is a need for significant human action on such a vessel. What cannot be forced with high energy density fossil fuels, must be made up for with intelligence and agility, but also with physical effort.
There are also questions of scale. What if this was a real thing? Someone would have to deliver this every day, leaving at dawn or earlier to get the freight to Linz for delivery in the colder hours of the morning. The romance of boat living raises its head, is this attractive? The boat we are using would not be appropriate or particularly effective, as it is neither rain proof nor does it have a proper sun cover. However, in order to deliver the 300 vegetable boxes that would be approximately the daily deliveries to Linz, a speculative small boat using the mini-container system described above would not need to be significantly longer or larger and could be designed to have a much better underwater shape for efficient movement. It is arguable that a vessel for the 1000kg transport would have a similar wetted surface as the test boat, and would thus require essentially the same energy. The weight of the batteries acts as ballast in order to balance the small but helpful sail plan. This sail plan might be a stumpy schooner or even square sails, to make most use of the winds that are predominately parallel to the river: either against the vessel or pushing it along from behind. Solar panels on all flat surfaces charge batteries, perhaps the sails are soft solar panels as well, charging as they push the boat along. The vessel could be outfitted with a small cabin for overnighting, on evenings when returning home to land might be less attractive. Still under the ten-meter limit that defines small vessels on the Danube, this could be a comfortable yet compact home away from home. With the vessel length increasing towards twenty meters, it would definitely be survivable, perhaps even comfortable.
Such vessels might begin to look and work like the sailing barges that were the main transport devices in the UK and other parts of Europe before the development of steam engines and trains, only disappearing in the 1960s with the advent of reliable diesel motors. A traditional cargo barge was run by two people, a skipper and a ‘boy (who might have been as old as the skipper) as they sailed the canals and shorelines transporting cement, bricks, hay and anything else that was needed. Riverboat life was rough, collegial, competitive and romantic, and had existed for centuries before it disappeared abruptly with the introduction of diesel barges. And yet it might make a high-tech return.
S07:
So, we arrived once again at the quantitative, and partially the speculative. We journeyed from the harbour in Linz to the loading pontoon in nearby Eferding at Brandtstatt. That return journey required 7.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, measured by the amount of electricity consumed to recharge the batteries. Note that this was a worse (but not worst) case scenario in many ways: the river was slightly above average depth and thus flowing strongly and we did not use sails at all for the journey. This is the equivalent of 26.3 megajoules (MJ), the proper SI unit of energy. The road delivery to Linz and back from the same place is a roundtrip of 53km. The best-case road version of this journey would be done with a high efficiency neighbourhood electric vehicle (NEV) which can transport up to a tonne effectively. Based upon standard figures (gathered from Wikipedia) this would require 20 MJ, so it would be slightly more efficient in terms of energy than the boat. However, these vehicles are probably not road legal outside the city.
A more valid comparison would be with one of the new generation of electric delivery vans. Based upon claims rather than experience, the Chanje V8100 with 1000 kg of load would has a range of 240km from its 100kWh capacity, which without being too exact would indicate that 53km would take 22.1 kWh which is about 80MJ. Even if this is out by a factor of two, because the range is based on using only half the battery capacity, we are still at around 40MJ for a delivery van to do this journey. So, the boat ‘wins’ this round. Comparing it to contemporary systems: a delivery van would need about eight litres of fuel for the journey, 18kg of CO2. So, over a year, the CO2 footprint of about 1.4 people as a global average. Given that overnight charging would use hydroelectric power from the turbines on the Danube, so with zero CO2 emissions, this is a significant but not huge change from this perspective.
N04:
Time spent on the water carries another temporality. One is disconnected. An island, but floating, unyoked from the banal mundanities of the shore, the ties that bind, the relationships and commitments. Afloat, one floats free. Navigating the river, with its blending of bridges and barges, vehicle thoroughfares and untamed wilderness, embankments and rubble flats, one becomes perhaps atemporal, but not in the way that Sterling (2009) meant it. For one is not networked in real time, rather one is de-networked. The issues of moving, living, acting upon the water are atemporal in ways that are beyond any particular time frame.
Continual monitoring of battery charge levels, making stream flow observations, paying attention to traffic on the river, to floating objects and the possibility of rocks not awash while avoiding the stronger flows that can be barely stemmed in a small vessel, one becomes supremely attuned to the river and to the passing of time. One is mindful to a level rarely experienced in land life. Seafarers remind us that 98 percent of time on the water is dull and repetitive. This is where we ‘swallow the anchor’ if we are not paying attention (Porteous 1966: p. 218). We need to notice.
N05:
We are sure that it could be said, that the experiment was unnecessary; it was clearly doomed to fail. As are so many efforts, from the long-term futility of palliative care to the desire for literary greatness in an endangered language, we are reminded of Keynes' ‘in the long run we are all dead’ (Keynes 1923: p. 80). Every act of attention, whether to an unwell person or to a burning narrative or a future scenario fragment, opens a window into the possible and the elegant; a way of seeing, an avenue for Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing's Arts of Noticing (2015). We are reminded that the act of care, the creation of culture, has value in and of itself. It enhances our abilities to pay attention, to empathise, to show and experience compassion.
The unavoidable nature of reference to capitalism and its logics, with such abstractions as the market, capital and efficiencies, has been commented on at length, notably in the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996). The ‘doomed to failure’ is, on many levels, an argument based upon capitalist logics of Return on Investment and other matters. Gibson-Graham opens up this assumption and by queering economics, show that there are so many forms of economics that we are often not consciously aware of. However, when we look, when we notice, we see and are aware of many other forms of economic activity that are non or post capitalistic. In the arts-based research world, Georgios Papadopoulos comes to mind (2021), and the work of Kate Rich and her feral Trade Network (Gibson, Rich 2020) is perhaps one of the strongest arts-based explorations of post capitalistic economics. Her projects are ‘doomed to fail’ as commerce but manage to carry on and do what they do, regardless. What we call economics is, at its best and at its root, an analysis of the household and of everyday life; places where the most expected and the most abstruse things happen.
Mathematicians rarely introduce a new theoretical concept without offering examples. Research mathematicians do not wait long without at least trying to build, define or otherwise get their hands on specific examples of the things that they wish to investigate; for theory is a great tool, but experience is its flipside, with comparable power. With an experience, one knows that something is possible, with all of its associated details; with theory I know what the general structure is, stripped of unnecessary details. But without an example, perhaps the theory truly is vacuous. Many things can be claimed about something non-existent, for they can never be tested.
When we create experiences of possible futures, we look to embed them in the minutiae of everyday life, for there we find the details that make the scenarios alive. Similarly, when we invite participants in a workshop to imagine a future, we do so by asking them to dive from a scenario through a story-world, a situation and into the stuff of experience; the posters and pencils, the events and the eventualities that make up quotidian life (Time's Up 2023: p.47). The everyday is where we do and will live; it is the place where every meal happens, where compassion is lived, where we daily try and mostly fail.
Navigation help for Heterotopic Spaces
1: Ubiquity. Every society has spaces that are heterotopic.
2: Fluidity: Precise yet fluid meanings and functions.
3: Heterogeneity: the juxtaposition of several sites, which are mutually incompatible.
4: Heterochronicity: they occupy distinct slices and perceptions of time.
5: Open and closed; they are isolated and penetrable.
6: They function in relation to everything outside.
S06:
We visited the banks of the Danube around the areas that we would need to deliver to and looked at the places that could be used for landings. In a speculative future there would be a dedicated pontoon with access ramps wide enough for large bicycle trailers; for this prefigurative experiment we needed to rely upon existing infrastructure. We looked at ramps and pontoons and the back entrance to the Salonschiff Fräulein Florentine, a cultural barge with a bar on the banks of the Danube in Linz. We talked to bicycle transport people about the accessibility of each of these landings and settled on a few possibilities.
We then readied the boat and took off for some experiments on the water. How accessible are these positions from the stream? Are there hidden hazards below the silty waters? Can we moor up safely? Are there good bollards, cleats and rings to moor to? Is there delivery access and flat surfaces to roll a stack of boxes across? We travelled the route to investigate the effect of curves in the river on water speed, to see how close we could be to each bank, and find out when it made sense to cross to the inner side. We slipped into quantitative research: what was the necessary speed on the electric motor? What was the charge in the batteries? How long and how much charge did each kilometre take? As we motored along, we looked at different regimes of power to the motor: too high and the batteries drained quickly, too low and we made no headway against the current. There is a mathematically sweet spot that might be ascertained and we began talks with colleagues in the energy analysis sector to work out what this might be. Experiential factors re-emerged: is this a one-person show or does it require crew? Transport is an essentially meditative task, hours on the helm or at the steering wheel are repetitive but require constant awareness. So, what happens if the freight from the streets ends up on the water? What if this became reality?
We were now in a position to run some test deliveries in order to best ascertain whether the process would make sense. At this point it was decided that the necessity of a stable, documented and uninterrupted cold chain was paramount, and that actual freight could not be safely transported within the financial and organisational bounds of the project. A lot of hours of work go into pedalling the bike, driving the van or helming the boat, and so much more work goes into the logistical organising of all the boxes that are moved by these various transporters. Whether it is the heavy coloured steel boxes of the trans-oceanic freighters or the small plastic boxes of organic fruit and vegetables, so much effort goes into organising them, securing them and making sure the right one gets delivered to the right place, in the right condition. If you didn’t want zucchini in your vegetable box, you are not happy when you get the wrong delivery, a whole box of them. A container filled with plastic toy ducks does not replace the family furniture being shipped across the world.
This chart published at Turnton, 9 August 2023, under the superintendance of the Hydrography Institute of the Global Transparency Agency.
N03:
There is something supremely absurd about sailing on the Danube.
A small band of sailors exist, mostly confined to the calm, barely moving regions of the Danube above the dams, locks and hydro power stations. It is rare to see a vessel with sails set in the flowing sections of the river. We have enjoyed seeing other wind driven craft on the river, it helps us feel a touch less absurd. We are somehow confirmed in the abstruseness of our actions.
When we took a sail and muscle powered vessel down various rivers and canals in the 2011-2012 project Control of the Commons (Time's Up 2012), we were regarded as some kind of intruders. The rivers were populated with commercial barges, water skiers, houseboats and kayakers. Travelling with something wind driven was rare; travelling with something so obviously nonstandard as a Dhow-rigged raft or a Junk rigged catamaran Zille bordered upon the ridiculous. Newspaper reporting ensued, as we found out when some crazed yelling in Belgium brought us to the shore, to be given a copy of the local paper with our photo emblazoned under a headline ‘Strange little boat on canal’ as we raced through a regional town.
By stepping outside the normal way of doing a journey we had created some kind of performative moment, a performance that went on and on, echoed by the reports and notes of our intermittent companions.
S05:
It was clear that we had begun to slide into the experiential realm. Here, not only the anecdotal and qualitative understandings from interviews with people involved in today’s version of the industry played a role, but we were beginning to be part of the planning and development of ways forward. It was time to carry this onwards.
S04:
We started talking to people doing this work already; farming cooperatives, vegetable box deliverers and solidarity farmers, e-trike deliveries in the city, bicycle trailer users, designers and builders. We spent time discussing storage areas for deliveries, as a community supported agriculture project might not want to deliver each box to customers directly. We spoke to people who deliver individual and individuated boxes of vegetables and other supplies to house doorsteps. We talked about trailer systems to allow various riders to deliver supplies, compared to using a customised trike with secure systems to avoid losing control in the wind, rain or snow. We found out about the use of boxes, evaporative cooling, ice bricks and other ways to avoid wilting the produce.
We learnt that it was not the distances or the routes that were the main blockage, but the handling between each stage, the logistical discontinuities. One development that was discussed at length for individuated boxes was the development of insulated mini-containers that would take around 20 individual boxes, stacked in the correct sequence for delivery and able to be easily loaded and locked onto a delivery bike. The rider could load and secure the container, and ride to each address on the delivery list, always taking the next box without having to search for the right number. This led to us looking at derrick cranes to load and unload mini-containers, each weighing up to 250kg, from the boat to a dock.All of a sudden those images of equipment on the Dutch Tjalk and English sailing barges made a lot more sense.
S03:
Previously we investigated the possibilities of freight on the Danube from a legal and administrative perspective, asking what we would need to do in order to create a legal sail-electric delivery enterprise along the river. Interactions with legalities, such as the Tree Identity project from FoAM (2012), can be a powerful and insightful way to look into the hegemonies of decision making in which we live, the legal and regulatory infrastructure that enables our lives. The legalities, policies, financial and other support for various enterprises creates paths of action and ways of acting for all participants, and are often created with the assistance of entrenched interests, lobby groups, friends' advice, and all the other aspects of political reality that have got us to where we are. Some administrators see it as part of their job to find solutions within the legalities. It turned out to be neither particularly complicated, nor expensive to create a small, green cargo enterprise. The process, for a small ship of less than two hundred tonnes, requires a police check and not much else. Anybody could become a cargo shipping company owner, with a small boat with less than fifty horsepower and twenty meters length.
As a result of this we had legally registered a small boat as a freighter capable of carrying up to 500kg of cargo. Not much compared to Tres Hombres or the Avontuur, much less compared to river barges such as Revolution and completely insignificant compared to a container ship or an ore train. But it was a thing; a stick in the sand; a position of reference. Given the legalities, we began to look at logistics. We looked at how best to carry the standard vegetable boxes used throughout Europe, how to stack, secure, shade and cool them, we relocated cleats and deck equipment, we planned movements and loading paths across the tiny deck, planned cranes and tie-downs and as many details as we could imagine.
N02:
The Danube and, as far as we can tell, most rivers and bodies of water, exert an influence upon people of all stripes, from adventurers to artists, flaneurs to dropouts. From the Time’s Up studios between the industrial harbour and the Danube, we see strange vessels floating past, powered by oars and motors, but rarely by sail.
Around this there is a long history of art-based projects on the Danube. A few that have a Linz relation are worth reflecting upon. The Messschiff Eleonore has been set up in collaboration with the Stadtwerkstatt and operates as a nonmoving vessel for a series of arts projects, residencies and experimental practices, from radio projects to aquaponics, film nights, music and electronic experimentation.
The transmedia artist Maruska Polakova departed from the Messschiff Eleonore for her project Downstream, where she charted and documented riverside cultural projects from Linz to Belgrade in 2016. The vessel was returned to Linz on a freighter and craned back into the harbour from the deck of a cargo ship.
The University for Design masterclass Space and Design Strategies undertook a massive residential travel project Flagship Europe, on the ship Negrelli in 2005. Re-building the ship as a mobile studio, with audio and video recording and editing suites, performance spaces and much more, the project took a large group of students and staff from Linz to the Black Sea, with a number of them taking the ship back to Linz as well.
Rainer Prohaska’s series of projects, from the Z-Boats (2007) to MS Fusion (since 2020) has revolved around a custom designed and built vessels, based upon traditional Austrian Zille boats in a catamaran or trimaran construction. Participants join the vessel as artists or scientists in residence for a period as the vessel travels from Austria to the Black Sea, where they are dismantled and carried back by trailer.
In Rowing for Europe, the Austrian cultural worker Klaus Harringer and the Turkish architect Ihsan Banabak rowed an open Turkish boat from Linz through south west Europe towards Istanbul.
The range of projects is wide, from stationary, mobile, alone, large groups, science, technology, art, culture, research and much more. Yet, all projects include the realisation that things are not as they are expected to be. They are arts-based research almost immediately, even if they had no initial research intentions. The river, and water in general, immediately confronts expectations and plans, creating opportunities for insights and novelty. The liminality of the river, once the northern border of the Roman Empire, at another time the dividing line between the Russian and Allied forces, before Austria was reunited in 1955, is ever present. Incessant flow draws contemplation, as the pull towards the Black Sea makes the temptation to travel immanent. The river, and the art projects that surround it, are always an intertwining of the romantic, the ideal, the practical and the improvised.
S02:
Our speculation was: how would this work if the artery for delivery was the Danube? How could this work? Would it make any sense at all, from energy, employment, timing and other points of view?
One way to investigate this speculation would be quantitative, to collect numbers from certain websites about the energy requirements of certain vehicles, multiply these with weights of food and delivery distances to come up with a few numbers about fuel use, electricity use, time use and other easily measurable numerical quantities. Another course of action would be qualitative, to interview and work together with people in the industry to see how they transport and deliver food, and how our idea would interfere with their techniques, planning, processes and heuristics. Yet another would be experiential, to do the whole thing and find out how it works by embedding one’s self in the process; in an imagined future.
Being who we are, we chose all three. More is sometimes still more.
Running Freight on the River
A Clean Cargo Prefiguration
Tim Boykett and Tina Auer
The almost speechless movie Tuvalu (Helmer 1999) contains one spoken scene memorable for its lack of need for translation. In the desolate bathhouse, the dark toothed cashier waits behind a counter. A man attempts to pay her for entrance to the bathhouse, her reply is to push his hand with the coin out the small window, point to the console and say ‘Technology, System; Profit!’ The coin is inserted into the slot, travels down a cardboard and sticky tape ramp into a glass jar, she makes mechanical sounds with a key across a washing board to emulate the sounds of machinery and pokes an entrance ticket to the bathhouse through a slot in her console. The simulacrum is finalised as she ignites her steel cigarette lighter behind one of the indicator panels to indicate that the visitor can enter the bathhouse.
While this scene almost reeks of cargo cult progress (Xygalatas 2022), it reminds us that sometimes, the best way to get an idea of a possible future is to act as if it has already happened. Rosa Parks did not wait for the rules to change, but acted as though the world was already more just. She was, to use the well-worn words, being the change, she wished to see.
Stuart Candy (2017), Superflux (2017), Scott Smith (2020) and FoAM (Kuzmanovic et al. 2019) are just a few of the practitioners using the techniques of Experiential Futures in their work to create forms of Futures Literacy (Miller 2018). With techniques ranging from video provocations and guerrilla posterings to immersive installations and prehearsal performances, the field is abundant with active development. Our work at Time's Up is primarily centred around large scale immersive physical narratives (Time's Up 2017). Time's Up also undertake workshops, futuring exercises and other explorations of possible and preferred futures. In 2020 we undertook a prefigurative exploration of sail freight on the inland waterways of the Danube.
S01:
Since the ancient Greeks, it has been common knowledge that the best way to move something heavy is to float it on a barge. This can be experienced by holding a large boat in calm water with no wind; it is remarkable easy to move the boat around with some small, consistent force. This is not so easy to do when the boat is on the ground, as you can easily test as well.
The Danube Clean Cargo project has changed shape a few times but has come down to the form of a thought experiment with some practical experiments to settle a few details. The question that arose was that of regional supplies and deliveries, logistics and systems for food. Along the Danube River from Linz there is the Eferdinger basin, a flood plain that has excellent soil and is one of the mainstays for vegetables and other foods coming into the city. Currently this food is brought into the city with trucks and vans for distribution either to supermarkets or for direct delivery.
N01:
The Danube is a thoroughfare. Meeting the Linz harbourmaster to discuss details, it became clear that, as a former barge captain, he was averse to non-barge traffic on the river. The white fleet, as the large tourism ships are known, were tolerable in that they were of similar size and industrial might. For him it was the aquatic equivalent of the autobahn, where no pedestrians or bicycles are to be found, committed to the efficient movement of freight and persons along its length, at the highest speed and density.
Watching the freighters pass by, with their international blend of flags, from Belarus to Malta, is an embedding in the cosmopolitan flux of commerce and transport. Perfectly lit, floating hotels race by with the passengers listening to recordings of Strauss as they head to Vienna, a crew of Moldavians and Czechs guide several thousand tons of coal, scrap or wind turbine parts upriver with roaring motors.
Every ship is an invitation to cast off, to accept the offer of a path into the unknown. Engineers we have met on the Danube talk of their trips to Cuba in the great Soviet ships of the 1970s. Cuba, a distant land that Eastern Europe was nevertheless allied with, another of the strange marriages of convenience on the water. An inland passenger ship incapable of crossing the open water of the Mediterranean is registered in Valletta, Malta. It will never visit its home port but takes refuge under a flag of convenience. The sea is an offer of advantage, while the ‘Lore of the Sea’ speaks of its flipside, the necessary mutualism that all seafarers experience as they battle the elements and experience disaster. Refusing to rescue seafarers in need is not an option, neither legal nor moral. Even that scent of high sea solidarity is present on the Danube.
Notice to Mariners
Please head upriver. The southern side of the Danube (S01-S09) follows the project and its thought processes. The northern side of the Danube (N01-N07) attempts to contextualise the journeys in the framework of our general work and others reflections.
We recommend starting at S01.
The channels are marked, but there are certainly ways through the sandbanks that are unmarked, emergent and contingent upon the whims of the river and its currents. If you run aground, enjoy the time as you wait to float free.