Maritime Digital Twins. From Bridges Simulators to Regimes of Infrastructure Control

12.11.2024 12.11. / 12–2 pm / C40.176 / Talk with Sebastian Vehlken (German Maritime Museum, Bremerhaven) For those of you that would like to join online, please contact Inga Luchs at inga.luchs@leuphana.de for the Zoom credentials.

Despite the clichédness of the term, Maritime Digital Twins are increasingly prevalent in the field of ship design. They manifest as three interconnected, yet specific ‘environing technologies’ which, in combination, are promoted as a bold attempt to calculate everything in and around naval infrastructures: First, ship bridge simulators – a common physical twin environment used mainly for educational and training purposes – today are enhanced and altered by digital components like VR tools and body sensors that render human agency ever more calculable. Second, digital twins of whole ships transform design. They can be understood here as an environing technology that incorporates hydrodynamic features and simulated environmental forces into the forms and features of ships. That novel ability to use high-performance computing infrastructures in computer simulation models to calculate the hydrodynamic properties of full-size ships in great detail brings computer simulations, classical models, and the eventually built ‘real’ ship into a multi-layered and shifted relationship – possibly with consequences similar to the advent of scale models in the late 18th century. And third, recent maritime “ship lifecycle twin” schemes connect these already complex construction processes with a ship’s operation control, monitoring and maintenance, ship owner’s fleet management, and finally with the vessel’s decommission. With regard to these different forms of maritime digital twins, my contribution deals with the imagination – or more precisely: the phantasma – of comprehensive computer control and controllability which is revived in the concept of the Digital Twin, by means of some recent examples from the field of ship design and construction.

Bio:

Sebastian Vehlken is Professor of Knowledge Processes and Digital Media at the German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History, Bremerhaven, and at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. From 2013-2022, he was Junior Director and later Senior Researcher in the DFG Collaborative Research Group Media Cultures of Computer Simulation. From 2017-2021, he also held a professorship in the field of Media Theory and Media History at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Research Interests: Theory and history of digital media, History of computer simulation, Oceans as spaces of knowledge, Digitality and material cultures, Theories and history of complexity science

Contact: Ina Dubberke (ina.dubberke@leuphana.de).