If you go rolling down to Dublin town, you will find an art installation celebrating the poetic qualities of ships’ names.
Dublin Ships, by Cliona Harmey and commissioned by the city council, beams out the names of its port’s most recently arrived and departed ships on two large LED screens. They stand at the Scherzer rolling lift bridges in the old docklands area close to the striking harp-shaped Samuel Beckett Bridge built in 2009.
The ship names make allusions to maritime trade, cargoes, historical figures and distant places, says Harmey, and their juxtaposition can generate a form of poetic writing.
Superfast X-Bro Deliverer was the pairing the day TW+ discovered the installation. It does have a poetic feel, in a gangsta rap kind of way.
Ulysses keeps coming back to the list, which is fitting, given that James Joyce’s novel of 1922 followed a day in the life of its protagonist round the city. Jonathan Swift, named after the satirist and former dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, also figures heavily.
The installation is generated via a live Automatic Identification System feed that tracks the ships in the port, now further east than the old docks on the River Liffey.
Harmey is aware the containerships that come to the port “provide the necessary physical connections in the virtual networks of global communication and control. Without these ships, the world system would stutter and atrophy. Without the objects they transport, modern environments and lifestyles would be untenable.”
A century ago, Joyce wrote of the docks in his collection of short stories, Dubliners: “We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts.”
The installation can help bring a flavour of that past scene to modern Dubliners, according to the port’s chief executive, Eamonn O’Reilly. “The sights of ships entering and leaving the port day and night throughout the year spark the imaginations of most people, but unless you go far eastwards along the quays or out along the coast, the movement of ships will be unseen,” he says.
