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

Improbable Oceans was a business-as-form work that produced micro-batches of sea salt from bodies of water that exist only within the overlapping architecture of the global supply chain. By sourcing salt and water from distant origins and merging them under controlled conditions, I generated composite oceans that never existed on Earth but were nonetheless real. These improbable oceans formed through logistical entanglement, market timing, and the coordination of materials and systems of production. Because of the expenses involved in sourcing and production, including satisfying all requirements for commercially produced food items (opening and running a certified food business in a commercial kitchen with extensive insurance), this made the salt the most expensive salt in the world at $1,600 per pound. Each batch of salt indexed a moment when infrastructure briefly allowed two geographies to co-exist in a single crystal. More than a product, the work asked how authenticity is measured, how value is constructed, and what counts as origin in a world increasingly defined by movement and abstraction. Improbable Oceans operated as both document and artifact of an ecology made entirely of supply chains. 

    • 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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