wallpaper (8m), vitrine of sculptures, videos, text, drawings, paintings
This work charts the source and pathways of our internets, the ecosystem within which it operates, and the life-forms that live around it. It focuses specifically on submarine cables as hidden critical infrastructure that carries the world’s data, materiality, connection – the project of modernity, the premise of capitalist expansion, and abstraction – as lines running through the earth almost existing in a separate temporality. While the word cable accurately describes the conduit itself, mining colonies, satellite connections, shipping contracts, myths and wars are contained within it. How does data travel? Who and what does it meet on the way? Where are these conduits?
In the 1850s, the British found that the people of South-East Asia had a crucial material: a plant latex called Gutta-percha which paved the way for laying electric telegraph cables. While this communication revolution was underway, so was a simultaneous ecological disaster. The fibre optic cables we use today, providing 99% of our Internet, have evolved from these telegraph cables. The project will begin with this history and move forward in time, playing with the materiality of technology and will place life and labour at its core.
Nodal Narratives of the Deep Sea explores the material conditions of immaterial movement. It is part investigative, part narrative fictive and part instructional. A map attempts to reconsider the dominant layers within this ecosystem, annotated by a series of drawings, objects and videos telling stories of unstable relationships and those yet to be discovered. The promise of communication includes within it a partial history of the Internet, from plant matter to non-human immortality, mythology, control, and the condensation of time and space. These umbrella lenses form the backbone of the work, focusing on the anecdotal and the peripheral – where humans, plants and animals interact with and help redefine what it means to live with critical infrastructure.
Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings, JUNGE AKADEMIE,
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2023
Aarti Sunder 