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Ship-Writing: Shadow Fleets, Speedboat Partisans & Crises of the Maritime Geodigital Object

The next seminar session will be presented by Mikael Brunila, an invited postdoctoral researcher at the médialab. He will examine how ships have become objects that are at once technological, digital and legal, and how their data now shapes their existence and movement.

Event, Research Seminar

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Salle K.011, 1 place Saint Thomas d'Aquin 75007 Paris

Abstract

In May 2025, the Finnish state broadcasting company Yle noted how ships heading to and from Russian ports in the Gulf of Finland seemed to be engaged in a strange round dance. Moving in near perfect circles by the Finnish-Russian maritime border, the ships appeared to defy space and time, reporting coordinates at bizarre intervals, and often from the middle of nearby islands. Commenting on the trajectories, as they were reported on the popular tracking website MarineTraffic, a representative of the Finnish military dismissed them as false, a result of the ships willfully sharing fake positions through "GPS spoofing" or a more broad spectrum "GPS jamming" of signals in the area. "A near daily occurrence," as the representative lamented.

This talk will discuss the emergence of ships as technological (Simondon), digital (Hui), and legal (Pistor) objects, held together by data from classification societies, reconnaissance satellites, flagging registries, transponders, and more. Working through the case of speedboat partisans in the Strait of Hormuz and the movements of the Russian shadow fleet, I will present the various systems of digital representation and legal regulation through which ships, once made by the ship-wrights of old, are now continuously written as objects in their own right.

I suggest that the current loss of coherence in the composition of maritime geodigital objects signals a crisis in the regimes of maritime representation and regulation that have coordinated modern shipping. Drawing on the spatial thinking of authors such as Bob Jessop and Henri Lefebvre, I show how these crises should be understood in several spatial registers at different scales, including places, territories, and networks. I introduce data from various systems–including transponders, satellites, and ownership records–to demonstrate how the process of ship-writing and the current crisis can be traced empirically.

While the talk will primarily function as an outline for some of my upcoming postdoctoral research at médialab, it also offers practical pointers for anyone interested in conducting computational social science or GIS research in the maritime domain. 

Biography

Mikael Brunila is a Kone Foundation postdoctoral researcher at médialab. His project explores questions of opacity and information asymmetry in the domains of maritime logistics and urban housing. He is also investigating the epistemological foundations of large language models (LLMs) through a mixture of practical, computational engagement, and science and technology studies (STS). These projects all extend his PhD thesis in Geography from McGill University.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Brunila earned a Master’s degree in quantitative methods from Columbia University, as well as a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Political Science (IR) from the University of Helsinki. Brunila was also an applied machine learning researcher with Curbcut in Montreal, investigating quantification methods for areal interpolation between different spatial units and hierarchical modeling techniques for housing policy.

Before his academic career, Brunila worked as a journalist with an emphasis on politics, technology, and finance. He published journalistic books on the Finnish far-right, urban politics in Helsinki, and new digital enclosures. In 2023, he co-authored a book on the politics of friendship.

Practical informations

This seminar will be held in person and in English, on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM, in Room K.011, 1 Place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris.

Registration is mandatory via this link.