James Enos and Annie Simpson Launch Second International Summit: Port Futures + Social Logistics (PFSL02)

James Enos, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Art and Design, and Annie Simpson, Doctor of Design (DDes) from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, have been collaborating since 2020 on a dialogical practice that examines polycrisis and planetary urban critique. Their shared projects have ranged from passenger-traveler accounts through watersheds of energy transition to fieldwork on deep time at the Savannah River Site, consistently confronting the cultural, ecological, and political dimensions of anthropogenic change.

In 2022, Enos and Simpson co-founded Port Futures + Social Logistics (PFSL) alongside Stephen Ramos (UGA College of Environment + Design) and Jan Derk Diekema, with support from UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Conceived within the broader Port Journeys and HyperCultural Passengers networks, PFSL foregrounds the urgency of applying new, creative approaches to circulation studies and geo-cultural flux. Its first international summit, PFSL01, culminated in artist film screenings in Yokohama (Japan), Bierum (Netherlands), and Kaohsiung (Taiwan). Among the commissioned works were Cinematic Migrations (Vijay Rajkumar), The Underpass (Michael Kress), IPB (Brian House), After The Last (Mike McFalls & Nick Norwood), Transformations (Xin Cheng & Adam Ben-Dror), and The Sky is Not Sacred (Hồng-Ân Trương + Lien Truong).

Since 2023, Enos and Simpson’s work has emphasized public dialogues and performances rooted in reconstructing fieldwork footage while dismantling entrenched narratives. These engagements have traced topics such as militarized infrastructure (performed in Atlanta, 2024), historical land-use patterns and the ecologically uncanny (Chicago, 2024), and socio-environmental histories of maritime circulation (New York, 2025). In fall 2024, they were featured in a public conversation at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, highlighting the enduring value of phenomenological methods of monitoring change as an urgent counterpoint to the contemporary reliance on remote sensing in spatial design.

Of their recent collaborations, Social Logistics From the Heart of a Shipwreck, appeared in the first volume of Post-Rational Visuality (Noxious Sector Press, eds. Ted Heibert and Duncan MacKenzie). In February 2025 at CAA, hosted by the co-authers of Oceans, Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade, the pair premiered the performance, How to Measure An Ocean | Cutting Short the Swell, which approaches seasickness as a philosophical stance toward dislodging fixed positions in the face of rapid change

This November, Enos and Simpson will launch the second iteration of the project, Port Futures + Social Logistics 02 (PFSL02), with a screening at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design:

PFSL02 Screening

• Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025
• Time: 6:00–8:00 PM
• Location: Piper Auditorium, Harvard GSD

PFSL02 will feature work by more than twenty artists-researchers from seven countries, presenting new locationally-grounded short films that explore the cultural, ecological, labor, and logistical dimensions of ports, rivers, wetlands, and the sea in shaping global circulation and contemporary environments. The archive will also feature work from recent UGA Alum Mickey Boyd and MFA candidate Sam Horgan.

Following its Harvard premiere, PFSL02 will travel internationally through 2026 to venues including the Audio Foundation (Auckland, NZ), Zou-No-Hana Terrace (Yokohama, JP), Tainan Art Museum (Tainan, TW), HyCp Veddel (Hamburg, DE), WEP (Groningen, NL), and ATHICA (Athens, GA).

“PFSL is about inviting new voices into dialogue around circulation, sensing, and global flows,” says Enos. “It is an open platform for artists and researchers to explore how environmental urgencies, technological shifts, and cultural practices are transforming shared conditions.”

“In a time when design is called upon to deliver certainty in the face of environmental anxiety,” adds Simpson, “we are instead interested in calling upon modes of doubt, listening, and co-invention where the yet-to-be-articulated is a site of possibility.”

PFSL02 is curated by James Enos, Annie Simpson, and Jan Derk Diekema. More information can be found at www.social-logistics.org.

James Enos is an Associate Professor Interdisciplinary Art and Design here at UGA. He teaches graduate and undergraduate classes that study social, environmental, and cultural intersections across art and design.

Annie Simpson, UGA MFA alumna, is an experimental geographer, artist, and amateur shipwright working via sight-/site-based investigation to make films and essays. She holds  a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a 2026 Nominee for the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award (emerging designer).