Michal Kindernay (1978) is an intermedia artist, sound artist, performer, and curator. His audiovisual installations connect the realms and tools of art, technology, and science. He often engages with ecological themes, using technological approaches to reflect on environmental issues and their relation to nature. His work ranges from video and interactive installations to intermedia and documentary projects, sound objects, and compositions. He also participates on theatre, dance, and music projects. Kindernay is a co-founder of the non-profit art organization yo-yo and the initiator of the RurArtMap project. He has long been an external lecturer at the Department of Audiovisual Studies at FAMU and also works with the Institute of Intermedia. He is currently enrolled in the master’s program Art & Research at Prague City University and pursuing doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. He lives and works in Prague and has contributed as an artist, curator, and organizer to numerous international projects.

The oceans are flooded with goods packed into containers aboard cargo ships, some of which pollute the environment more than all the world’s cars combined. The markings and colours of the containers reference logistics companies and their geopolitical influence. The standardized container architecture of global transport has become one of the most visible symptoms of the global economy and late capitalism.

The video Cargo was filmed on location in the port of Hamburg, at the mouth of the River Elbe – the second largest port in Europe and the fifteenth largest in the world. The port area, including its infrastructure, covers 73.99 km², nearly the size of the entire city of Trenčín (82 km²). It is connected to the rest of the world through vast transport infrastructure and digital networks. In 2014 alone, nearly 100 million volume units passed through it (each equivalent to the contents of a standard six-metre shipping container).

Thousands of deserted agglomerations, stretching for hundreds of kilometres of streets, form new anthropocenic structures serving the flow of goods around the globe. Like the goods they move, the ports themselves stretch across the planet as empty backdrops to the spectacle of consumer existence.