FRIENDLY FLOATEES

This is the nicest thing I have read in a long time: For fifteen years now a few thousand plactis ducks are travelling the global oceans on their own. The facts are easily told: in 1992 a shipment of plastic bath toys called Friendly Floatees from the First Years Inc. were washed into the pacific Ocean when the ship on its way from Hongkong to Tacoma, Wahsington, lost twelve containers during a storm. One of those containers, probably when crashing into another one, opened and spilled out 29.000 plastic toys. Their cardboard packaging was soon destroyed by the saltwater, but the little ducks, frogs, beavers and turtles survived due to being nothing but a bubble of plastic filled with air.

The oceanographic scientist Curtis Ebbesmeyer tracked the plastic toys to study ocean currents. That is not strange to him, he had used a shipment of Nike running shoes as well. Ten months after the incident the first Floatees reached the Alaskan coast, about 2.000 miles from their starting point. Then they moved on to Washington were they were seen in 1996, then westward to Japan, back to Alaska, drifted northwards through the Bering Strait and then were trapped in the Arctic ice for another six years or so. As predicted by Ebbesmayer the Floatees next were seen in New England, Canada and Iceland and then reached the shores of the United Kingdom in 2007. Bleached by sun and seawater, the ducks and beavers had faded to white, but the turtles and frogs had kept their original colours. The further prediction is that they will move on a little more and finally be trapped in the Arctic ice forever.

That is just the facts, but the whole thing could also be read as an interesting metaphor on modern life. Which is just to say that there is a few interesting viewpoints to take this story as well. First of all it seems significant that these plastic toys came from Hongkong. Of course, they are “Made in China”, like almost everything else that is a children’s toy made of plastic. The Chinese are flooding the whole planet with stupid plastic toys, if one of those containers had 29.000 pieces inside, and twelve were washed overboard than maybe another 50 of those containers were still on board, making for 14.500.000 litte plastic toys. That is one for one in twenty US citizens.

On the other hand, what bad can be said about a little plastic duck that makes its way out of a dark cage were it is trapped with a large number of its colleagues and then starts a travel that brings it all over the world, filled with adventure, dreams and liberty. In fact, two children's books have been written about the ducks, and I would advise Dreamworks or Disney to take a long deep and good look into the story, because it offers a lot of possibilities. Those duckies being trapped inside the ice for such a long time made me think of the little, artificial boy in the movie “AI”, where at the end he is also sitting on the bottom of the sea for a million years until liberated by aliens. I always found that ending very very sad and touching, though to this day there is something that profoundly disturbs me about it. I haven’t yet found the nerve to work out what it is, but some day I will, I guess. Maybe my own little robot boy will help me out then.

Everybody knows my penchant for strange facts and weird stories, but those are important to me because they prove that this world is full of things that cannot be explained, full of chaos and randomness that produces the nicest and funniest little things. I like it a lot when the universe itself shows a little sense of humor and confronts the people on earth with a puzzling and stunning sight. Something like this can always help to get people out of their daily routines, their dogmas and unwritten laws. It seems important to me that mankind does not take itself so goddamn seriously, with all the quarter business reports, the growth and return on investment statements and investor’s relations. And if that little crack that gives people a nudge and tells them to get the sticks out of their asses and loosen up a little, also makes them smile, then the better. And the sight of a few hundred, faded but freely floating plastic ducks on the high sea ought to make you smile at least a little. Maybe not if you are so uptight you haven’t even smiled on your wedding pictures or a hardcore environmentalist, but like all the rest of us normal, regular people.

In a way these random occurences act on people and make them react like art does; with re-judging their stereotypes and prejudices about live. This seems the best part to me, to see that nature itself is able to produce art, and not only in the beauty of undisturbed nature or the fragile complexity of a butterflies wingcolours, but also using manmade, synthetic items and then re-working and re-adjusting them to a new meaning. No wonder those little toys go for prices as high as $1.000 with collectors. Art always has a high price, otherwise it wouldn’t be art, right?

Finally, what nicer statement could be made about globalisation in conceptual art? If this had been an idea by any kind of artist, I would have liked, though this way I like it a lot more. I know, the term globalisation has been overused and misused a hundredthousand times and then some, but this story has all the right ingredients: a synthetical toy standing for the excesses of consumerism and materialism, the sheer number of released plastic toys is a hint at the problems that mass-industrialisation bring as well as the fact that this planet is becoming mighty crowded in some places. The incident happened close to the dateline which could either be interpreted as an anarchistic reaction to the dogmatic regulations and division of the world into zones, or it could be seen to say something about the way people are lost on this planet. The long and global travel is almost to easy to decipher and the fact that their route was correctly prognosed shows that man has finally really found a viewpoint were he thinks that he has mastered power of nature – when the release itself shows that nature still has the upper hand. The last point would not have been possible if this had been a willed act by an artists, so nature wins out double.

It makes me smile just to think that currently there are a few thousand little duckies swimming on their own free will from the coast of England out onto the sea to travel the ocean yet another time. Bon route! And all the best to you, Friendly Floatees!

Georg Cracked, February 2008