‍Lines are willfully ignorant of volume. Precisely because of this, lines are forced to confront volume at every turn. As they strive to abstract themselves down to one dimension, lines must negotiate endlessly with all three stubbornly material dimensions. Their linearity is never more than a bargain of convenience, a tolerable approximation of an abstract ideal. Abstraction is not itself an abstract process.

This video feature accompanies the article “The social production of container space”. Although a sizable body of popular and academic literature explores how shipping containers have reconstituted the spaces through which they travel, the space within containers themselves remains largely unexamined.

The increasingly common conjunction of contemporary art and logistics (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015) might be cause for incredulity in some quarters—not least those of logistics specialists or art historians. However crucial to the working of contemporary economic life—so much so that theorists have taken to speak of a shift to supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009)—the visible manifestations of this material theory and practice of the circulation and assembly of commodities appear stamped by an inexorable banality, especially in that modular metonym for global capital as a whole, the container.

The New Silk Road presents the perspective of a world without barriers, where logistics is not a means but an end. A world in which connectivity is productive in itself. This vision, repeated over and over again by the participants of the Forum, is not just a vacuous slogan for a complex project yet to be defined.

I draw on the idea of infrastructuring to approach ethnographically the human and material components of infrastructure "in the making." While much of the literature on humanitarianism, human rights, and development has attended to politics, law, and ethics, an attention to infrastructuring moves past idealist concerns to the technicalities through which ideals become enacted on the ground.