About
Liquid Time (Miriam Matthiessen and Jacob Bolton) are a research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds.
We think, write and make video works around logistics and time.
We study logistical systems because we think they are the best way to understand weird movements in political economy, geopolitics and labour struggle. We focus on maritime trade systems, because that’s the main way commodities move. We approach logistics as a project of time management: an expanded process of configuring and distributing world time – both present and future.
Logistical infrastructures are global capital’s nervous system. They are not just passive enablers of trade, of getting goods to market. They are active agents in making, shaping, reshaping those markets, of determining what commodities will flow and how they will do it. These infrastructures – megaports, container ships, and the millions of people that work to keep them running – carry with them a forward motion, an inertia that keeps the wheels of accumulation turning.
Logistics would seem to be just about enabling present markets to function – for value to be realised in the present – but every port expanded, every megaship built, every shipping lane that is securitised is at once a bet on and a manifestation of a particular version of the future. Logistical planning, in this sense, mirrors the temporal acrobatics of finance: the present is produced through anticipation around competing futures.
We are interested in the interplay between prediction and production, between forecasting and manifesting. We want to understand how logistical infrastructures don’t just enable particular economies to function in the present, but work to produce and normalise particular futures. The futures that logistics produces are often just continuations, updates, patches on an untenable and violently accumulative present. We want to study that.
Email:
jacobbolton[@]protonmail.com
&
miriam.matthiessen[@]gmail.com
jacobbolton[@]protonmail.com
&
miriam.matthiessen[@]gmail.com