Mapping the Ocean:
With Your Body
/Athena Mothership
05/04/2025/
What is visible and what is invisible on a map?
Ocean sensors are deployed to measure stark landscapes in Arctic borders and Pacific vortex where human bodies cannot fathom. Satellites mark every vessel in the world that is open to communicate. The technological instruments collect and transmit data, construct an authorised algorithmic reality, and cultivate a top-down epistemology that often edits out uncertainties and entrenches categories. Meantime, cosmopolitical nomads move between lands and seas, measuring the oceans with their bodies: life becomes non-life trackers. But there is so much in the lived experiences that cannot be reduced to data. What is more to give? Until it becomes a thing given? These bodies, the nomads, the lowlife, remain unseen by the masses of bodies on land who enjoy the same beaches from which they depart; who consume the seafood they harvest through long hours work; and who frequent the postcard image of the sea—which extends into an unregulated space, a blue virtual operating system, where things shift and move fast, to fathom, bodies on land must rely on data, or the bodies that make their way back to shore.
13th August, 2011, Rongcheng Shidao Harbour, Shandong, China, in the heavy rain, a pelagic fishing boat is towed back to the harbour where it disembarked 6 months ago. The trawler, “Lurongyu 2682”, and its 33 crew members, set out to jig squid in the South American high sea, but lost communication near Chile since 16th June, and when it surfaced back on the satellite map near Japan in August, it issued a distress signal, and during the untrackable period, 22 fishermen were murdered by the 11 survivors.
Dare——datum——data
Dare, (Latin.) To give;
Datum, (Latin.) Thing given;
Data (pl.) transmissible and storable computer information.
What is more to give? Until it becomes a thing given?
According to the survivors’ account, mutiny arose when some crew members discovered that, without legal documentation to work at sea and despite working extremely hard around the clock, they couldn't earn the advertised wage and became illegal to touch any land — forever enslaved on the boat. Near Chilean waters, 8 fishermen hijacked the ship, disabled satellite communications, and forced the captain to sail back home. In the ensuing conflict, the cook was killed with fish knives. ("It's not a big deal to lose one man—it happens all the time at sea. When we return, we report it as a man overboard during fishing work," said one crew member, who would not survive the voyage either.) With the first blood drawn, violence became addictive, and suspicion became compulsory. West of Hawaii, 9 were killed, 1 missing; east of the Japanese Sea, 10 were killed, 1 missing. The missing first mate sabotaged the turbine before jumping ship. As water poured in and the boat drifted motionless, the remaining 11 men activated the satellite communications for rescue, and everything flattened to a dot on the grid
From the Yellow Sea to the Galápagos Islands, Asiatic fishing fleets sail across the Pacific and hug the South America coastline tight year-round to fish the high sea. Chinese trawlers account for 99% of the fishing in Peruvian fisheries, and the squids are diminishing. The fishing will be then processed in Qingdao, before being distributed to Chinese, US and European supermarkets. Most crew members migrate from inland regions and at sea for the first time, coastal residents avoid these positions, knowing the grueling nature of the work. Criminal records, prison time, and debt are common among seamen. Malnutrition, abuse, mental and physical dilapidation go largely ignored. Their lives revolve around poker cards, cigarettes, phone fiction, religion, and pin-up posters—these are the hidden instruments that map out the ocean. Even while sailing in the Eastern Pacific, the crew maintain Chinese time on deck. As time zones shift throughout the voyage, temporal coordinates loosened, blurred, and dissolved alongside spatial ones. The ocean's desert-like expanse and strange warping of time created a bubble around the boat—a sphere of deceitful timelessness and autonomy around its own territory.
There are times you wonder, what lies behind a datum? What’s happening in the dot on the grid?
On the live marine vessel map, vessels, with Satellite-AIS (Automatic identification system) on, signal their real time location and identification, thus being colour-coded and their paths and numbers tracked. Trackable vessels form an entangled coloured web of monitoring, a kinetic organism floating on the global oceans. The long royal blue veins represent the busiest shipping lanes in the English Channel, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, where cargo ships and tankers connect the worlds. The most crowded local waters are unnamable: oxide-red jumbles stain the densely populated coastlines in Asia and Africa, where millions of fishing boats feed billions of mouths, and cargo boats load on labor/resource-intensive products. The haunting aspect of live marine vessel trackers is that although each vessel dot is visible for public inspection, the reality of life aboard remains hidden. Who are the people on these boats? What do they ferry? How do they live and work? What about when satellite communications are disabled, and a darker maritime underworld of traffics, hijacks, piracy, military ops weaves invisible layers of parallel oceans? These swarms of untrackable activity—geo-economic dark matter—pull the navigational mesh in oceans and beyond.
(Img1: Cargo vessels, tankers, passenger vessels, high speed craft, tugs & special craft, fishing ships, military crafts, yachts, navigation aids, and unspecified ships are each assigned a colour. On another layer of the map, vessel traffic density plots beam threads of movement in each river, lake, strait, sea, ocean. From 1 to 100K, ship density thermal coded from purple blue to maroon.)
(Img2: A cluster of fishing boats anchored in the South Pacific Ocean. We can identify each vessel's name, flag, and company, yet the actual activities occurring onboard remain hidden from view.)