Final Puff

About

Remorseless Havoc consists of an ocean of algorithmically generated language. The stanzas you can see zooming in on the map are generated by an algorithm from Sea and Spar Between, a work of digital literature developed by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland in 2010. They devised a grid of algorithmically generated verses assembled from language fragments by Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. If you open Sea and Spar Between in a browser, about 225 trillion entries extend almost endlessly in every direction, triggering the vertigo of combinatorics in an infinity with no practically reachable boundary, created from finite source material. Montfort and Strickland say their work contains as many verses as there are “fish in the sea.”

Remorseless Havoc takes that metaphor literally and maps the combinatory ocean onto the real seas of the world. It transfers Montfort and Strickland’s stanzas into a grid spanning the whole globe with landmasses spared. Each cell represents a space of about one square kilometre (1.1 × 1.1 km at the equator). This leaves out the majority of stanzas from the originally generated trillions. Approximately 460 million verses remain, with a subsequent second erasure following, driven by the real fishing operations of real-world ships searching for actual fish in the sea. Global Fishing Watch tracks the movements and activities of tens of thousands of fishing vessels via AIS transponder data; a daily retrieval translates their fishing hours into verse deletions on this website. This means that one day, all verses will have been removed from the sea — just as the resources of the ocean on which we depend, the store of language in this work is finite.

A note on the map. Its grid of one-square-kilometre stanza cells holds approximately 460 million entries. For rendering efficiency, the map displays a coarser tile grid of roughly 10 × 10 km (0.1°); each visible tile aggregates 100 stanza cells. The three shades on the ocean encode how much of each tile has been erased: intact (all 100 stanzas still alive), partially depleted (at least one erased), fully depleted (all 100 gone). When you zoom in, each tile reveals one representative stanza drawn from its centre cell; the full stanza cell grid is only ever consulted by the backend when a fishing event actually deletes verses.

You can watch this happen on the map, browse all poems generated in the Fleet-View or download the day’s poetry volume under Catch of the Day — an archive of the previous day’s erasures. Each vessel assembles the verses it takes from the ocean on a given day into a poem, ordered from greater lexical diversity toward monotony and simplicity. The poems of a single day are collected into a (rather large) PDF.

The work runs until the poetic ocean is empty. Based on current data, roughly until the year 2030. Then one last cell will remain — the “final puff” of the Leviathan, speculated upon in Chapter CV of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?”, from which the project’s title is also drawn as a direct quotation. Of the original 225 trillion possible stanzas, a single last poem will survive. When and where it emerges, and not least what its text will be, is determined by the contingencies of the exploitation of the seas.