about Songlines
Archival Pigment Prints
24×36 inches
2015
Our experience of interacting with contemporary information and communications technologies—such as the internet and smartphones—is one of entering into a virtual world through the portal of the screen. This interaction, combined with the types of terms used to describe these technologies—virtual, wireless, the Cloud—evoke an ethereal, bodiless system. However, these technologies are wholly dependent upon, and integral to, a vast system of cables, transmitters, and servers that are very material, have mass and volume, and exist is specific places and times. The “World Wide Web” is precisely that—a vast web of fiber-optic cables that enmesh the globe, spanning oceans and continents as they transmit information between us at the speed of light.
Songlines is a series of photographs that depict this network of fiber-optic cables where it becomes visible running in lines overhead. These data transmission lines are marked out from other networks—such as telephone and cable television—by teardrop shaped loops, which excess cable is pulled around to tighten the slack in the line. In these images, the cables are reduced to thin, horizontal stripes, which serve to illustrate the ideas of communication, transmission and the great speed at which data is flowing through them between their origin and destination. In their abstraction, they begin to resemble other types of lines—such as those of lined paper or musical scores—which represent forms of communicating ideas which have all but been replaced by the technological systems that fiber-optic cables are essential to.
installation from Stanford Art Gallery May, 2015