Generative Shipwrecks is a research project funded by The Arts Council through a DYCP grant  to use generative technology to create ‘shipwreck narratives’. 

 

Why shipwrecks? Also what do you mean by shipwrecks?

I’ve been working with shipwrecks for a couple of years. What started as a way of thinking about a kind of improvisation - you get somewhere you didn’t intend with a chance selection of things salvaged from disaster and you’ve just got to see what works, became as I worked with it something richer and deeper. I think of them as a way of having a story about human history and technology: for a long time some of the most complex things we as humans made we’re ship. And often we can see them as a kind of transitional fossil of human progress, preserved in a moment of time at the bottom of seas. So theres a history of human technology but mostly not particularly grand. Boats and ships all to often have an improvisational and accreted property to them, we tend to add to them, refashion them, cut and shunt them. That feels a very humane way to make things - all ships are Theseus’s Ship. 

 

The Torrey Canyon

A while ago I became interested in the Torrey Canyon, the idea of it, perhaps a parallel universe of it more than the thing itself. The Torrey Canyon sank on the 18th March 1967. Travelling between the Kuwait oil fields and Milford Haven in Wales the ship struck the Seven Stones Reef near the Scilly Isles. It was the largest oil disaster in the world at the time and it’s still the largest oil disaster in UK waters to date. The spill covered beaches around Cornwall and Devon, Northern France and the Channel Isles. It happened in the full view of recently mobile news reporting, occupied the national and political conversation and arguably created a generational change in perspective on oil, pollution and human impact. It was born entirely of human error compounded by a total lack of understanding on how to deal with it - where the ready answer was to bomb, incinerate and ultimately collect and contain. 

 

It also happened on a sunken land of arthurian legend, over the sunk plains of previously connected land, over the beach land of mesolithic humans and overlooked by ancient sacred landscapes. Theres a ship down between the cracks of the Seven Stones thats no part of lost land and populated by anemones. It’s as a dreamscape I’m mostly interested in rather than a documentary - and it’s this potential for alternarativity that makes me want to make machines make stuff up.

​​​