Utilizing Google Search I mapped one obscure ingredient in a bottle of Coca Cola: brominated vegetable oil. I was shocked by how much processing went into this one ingredient and even more shocked when I found out its purpose was to prevent sediment from forming in the bottle. All this for aesthetics?

I realised, in tracing the origins of brominated vegetable oil, raw materials are farmed or mined - for such a complex world our stuff comes from simple beginnings. I looked for the biggest of these places; and located them on Google Maps. Stealing 100’s of screenshots and carefully piecing the land masses back together and placing them side by side in Photoshop. 

We are all connected by these activities. So much of modern life is born out off crude oil, Samotlor field produces 6% of this, it is likely that many people have come into contact with oil from the Samotlor field. 

 

Foxconn produces 40% of the world's electronics and all of the mac devices. That means that myself and most of my contempoaries are connected to this network of factories across Asia, the people who work there rely on our purchases for their jobs, they use minerals processed at Baogang. They use designs produced in America and parts manufactured in Europe. This is truly a global assemblage.

These assemblages are for the most part unseen and unnoticed. How is something so big so obscured? Taking lead from the Unknown Fields Division, an architects collective, who undertook weeks at sea on a cargo ship to better understand this global infrastructure; I visited this country's two biggest ports to investigate. As this is the main global transport network I expected to find a hub of activity, as we consume and import so much. Felixstowe and London gateway are certainly operators in our global and industrial assemblages but both ports were deserted.

Both had multiple ships docked and on and off loading were underway simultaneously but there was not a person in site. It was a little disturbing and although they didn't feel like points on connection in reality, they were. 

 

Almost everything imported into Europe goes through eurooport in Roterdam. The ships eternally circle the globe collecting and delivering cargo, which dissipates out from these nodes via truck, train or plane.

This experience inspired a fictional map. I erased the 1000s of miles between us and China and placed one of their busiest port next to ours. I was starting to make visible industrial supply chains and reveal their actors, operators and networks.