BAY LOG

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This is a LOG of radio traffic received on Marine VHF channels 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21A, and 22A in poor receiving conditions (a basement window) from Oakland, California. This utilitarian and poetic LOG of human activity on the waters of the San Francisco Bay documents the coming and going of vessels, labor, and bureaucratic power that guide and are guided by human relationship to hydro-geography. The text of this LOG has been automatically transcribed from the radio transmissions by a machine-learning software. These occasionally useful yet comically inaccurate transcriptions reflect another history of the Bay – as fomentor and incubator for powerful and power-hungry technologies that offer lackluster performance at best, especially when attempting to keep electricity use to a minimum as in the case of the two computers receiving this radio traffic and building and serving this website. And of course, this is also a deeply impoverished LOG in accounting for the other forces, lives, and spirits that move through the Bay water and watershed – the fish, the microorganisms, the plants, the histories, the people indigenous, the sorrow and shame, the legal machinations, the joy of a wave. Surprisingly though, these things still make their way through, occasionally, in the radio traffic. Read more and you may find some:

LOG OF THE BAY