Introduction
The North Sea is one of the most industrialized and planned seas in the world. On the surface of water sail thousands of ships to her surrounding ports and transport cargo from all over the world. Deep bellow lie dozens of cable’s and pipelines as a transnational network to enable the transfer and trade of natural gas, oil, electricity, among other material and information. Oil platforms, offshore wind energy farm and artificial islands are realized on open sea.

Urbanization of the Sea
The book: Urbanization of the Sea from Nancy Couling and Carola Hein (nai010 publishers), tells the story of the sea-land continuum from the perspective of the North Sea. Trough different kind of stories (academic, literary, artistic, practical) and writers the book guides the reader trough this complex and fascinating topic.

Project
In association with Stephen Ramos (USA) I wrote a chapter for this book. Our story follows a submarine data cable that comes ashore in the Eemshaven-port and leads us to the sites of ASTRON in the hinterlands of the Northern Netherlands. Inspired by ancient Greco-Roman navigation techniques, we triangulate and relocate sea and land with the cosmos in a new age of geospatial information discovery along X and Y axes, and the Z-axis mundi.

For research Ramos and I traveled several times to sites in the provinces of Groningen and Drenthe. The combination of my background as an artist and his as an scientist lead to exiting story, interesting discussions, new insights, and a long term partnership between us.

Urbanization of the Sea is published in november 2020 and can be ordered at nai010.