IMPROBABLE OCEANS
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In 2015 I launched a business-as-form project where I produced the most expensive sea salt in the world ($1600/pound). I harvested small-batch sea salts from oceans that only exist as overlapping nodes in the supply-chain where water from one geographic location met salt from another geographic location. Watch the Kickstarter video below and then read more about the philosophy of the project here. Read a review in Nicola Twilley's "Edible Geography" here, read another one in Warren Ellis' "Orbital Operations" here.
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DATE: 2015
MATERIALS: salt, water
SCALE: business-as-form
DIMENSIONS: “the longest, most infrastructure-intensive supply chain in the world”
SITE: n/a
STATUS: complete
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Virtual Places: Core Logging the Anthropocene in Real-Time, Infrastructural Landscapes panel, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (2015), Chicago, Illinois.
“This is salt that can only exist at this particular moment in planetary history—salt that the ancient Chinese and Romans, for all their infrastructural ingenuity, could never have imagined. It combines the abstract logic of capital with the artisanal craft of micro-local production in seasoning form. Its ridiculousness is precisely the point.”
— Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography
“It’s possible that some ideas possibly shouldn’t extend beyond the design-fiction and documentation phase, but I admire anyone trying to do something as simple and insane as sending you sea salt that shouldn’t exist using a frankly bizarre combinatorial technique. Read the site, read and watch the Kickstarter, and you have, in a sense, been told a complete science fiction short story.”
— Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations
“The salt at the end of the longest, most infrastructure-intensive supply chain in the world, however, is the salt from Improbable Oceans.”
— Nicola Twilley, Edible Geography
