Nonhuman Cinema and the Logistical Sublime

Abstract

Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson's Logistics (2012) is the longest film ever made, at over thirty-five days in duration. The film endeavors to make the world-spanning network of global logistics perceptible through an experience of the slow journey of the Dutch container-ship Elly Maersk from Gothenburg, Sweden, to Shenzhen, China. Following this document of an oceanic passage that coincided with—and was at one point halted by—the events of the Arab Spring, this article explores how extreme durational cinema raises questions about the position of the spectator and the limits of representation in an era of digitally networked media. It suggests that there exists, beyond the immediate relationship between spectator and image, a correspondence between the magnitude of filmic address and the logistical conditions of art's creation.

The supply‐chain sublime: Spectacles of unagency in fictions of planetary economy

“…My use of the term, however, emphasizes the sublime, not as an ontological category inherent to the global economy, but as a literary technique: a strategy for representing an object understood by artists or audiences to resist representation. Here, I'm inspired by Kyle Stine's work on the “logistical sublime,” a term he borrows from Charmaine Chua to name the “overwhelming scale and multilayered complexity of global logistics” and to investigate how art might work to “pull the expanses of a global logistics system into the fold of representation” (Stine, 2021, pp. 117–118).…”

“…117–118). Stine finds the answer in works that, rather than striving to encompass the sublime economy, instead conversely “expose […] the spectator's inability to comprehend the whole” (Stine, 2021, p. 123). Following Stine, I suggest that artworks deploy the supply chain sublime when they represent the incomprehensible global economy by reflexively calling attention to their failure to represent it.…”