Water unsettles the principle of horizontality, especially at night, when its surface resembles pavement.

No matter how solid its substitutethe deck under your feet, on water you are somewhat more alert than ashore, your faculties are more poised. On water, for instance, you never get absentminded the way you do in the street: your legs keep you and your wits in constant check, as if you were some kind of compass.

Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

Venice is anti-Euclidean, and in this, most simply, it has a future as a prototype.

Italo Calvino

The firmitas of a solid topography congeals our perception of water as a resource and the sea as an externality. I would like to examine the articulation of the edge between land and water: This edge marks how one transitions from the land to the sea and thereby embarks on a voyage. Venice will be the paradigm through which to question this edge. The city is fertile as an experimental field to test tectonic strategies, modes of representation, perceptual climates, and hydrogeological behaviors. It bears both discrete and ambiguous enunciations of the edge between land and water at different scales. The symmetry of the wooden piles that lift the city and the pole-oar that propels the gondola is no accident, neither that the oar is used to punt, and but tangentially to row. The city exists as a dissonance between ground made of water and ground made of land, the tide mediating between the two. The precise delineation of an anthropomorphized wetland creates Venice; its urban configuration constantly projects one towards the sea, and its naval activity appropriates the faraway and maps the unknown. Its populace came from the mainland, its psyche from the farthest fruits of the oceans. The fourth CIAM conference of 1933 took place on a cruise ship from Marseilles to Athens, during which the Athens Charter was created small wonder that the manifesto for the new city and a new way of life was developed in a place away from all mans places. Systems of self-sufficiency designed by NASA for singular vessels to sustain life in outer space were prolifically displaced to the industries and technologies of dwellers on Earth.

This is the principle of voyage: Through the creation and use of a singular object sent on a journey into another medium, our familiar surroundings radically transform upon its return. I will construct a narrative of maritime voyage (incorporating different scales and different degrees of physicality) within which to operate on these issues. The occasion is a ritual of safe passage (for embarking a vessel and disembarking earthen ground). Land is demarcated; on it, the boat is constructed from eight types of wood and two hundred eighty pieces; the sailors take a bath of ablution in the lagoon. The crew then consults several deities: The Teatro del Mondo and its murmurings with the city, the Doge of Venice peering through the first Galilean telescope in the belfry of San Marco, Marco Polo and his tales of other spaces, Fra Mauro and his cosmographic dreams. Perhaps they encounter another boat, two merchants clandestinely transporting the body of St. Mark from Alexandria. They sail through the flotsam and jetsam of Byzantium Whether this ends like the Homeric odyssey or the Dantean journey, if at all, is yet unclear. Perhaps in the end, we will be presented with the conflated form of both Penelope and Odysseus. The densification of mainland inhabitation and the militarization against the sea is not the answer to a new way of life. Immunizing against water stunts our collective will to voyage. We are part water; we should not fear the ever-rising datum, and must learn to freely disembark from the land. One need not be a native to ones own island forever, nor a stranger on all extant islands. We must send fearless experts to explore and report on what they find. Intermittently, we will find each other on open waters.