[NetBehaviour] "Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes" — Until March 20 — Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona

[mario santamaria]

Dear all,
I present my last exhibition  and the
generous text of Natalie Kane has written to introduce the show.

All the best
m_ms

** * **
Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes

Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona
24.01.20 – 22.03.20

Photos 

* * *

*Trace Route *
Natalie Kane. Curator of Digital Design at Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

What we understand our body to be, or to exist as, has been irrevocably
complicated by the invention and expansion of the internet. As a public
interacting with technology, we no longer exist as a singularly stable and
defined, edge-bound being, as our data and lives leak out onto distributed
nodes that augment our own sense of self further than it already is. Where
we continue, where we are, even when we assume to be erased. Where and even
*when* we think we are not. The perception of our body through information,
as information, as a carrier and creator of information, as a subject of
perception and object of translation. This appears, or rather, is felt as
something media theorist Sun-ha Hong calls the “trace-body”: “When I feel
my own trace-body as an absent presence, I am also experiencing what it
feels like to have machines and databases mediate between me and myself.” A
series of out-of-body experiences constantly overwriting, corrupting,
glitching. We already contend with an unstable sense of self by just being
human, but when faced with a multitude of other possible presences through
the data profiles that we create ourselves, or through those that are
created for and about us (with or without our knowledge) by corporate or
governmental actors, this distribution across time and space feels
necessary to account for through personal acts.

When something is lost or leaves us, or is taken away, we often look. In
writing this for Mario, who himself had taken a journey to find his own
trace-body, I looked to where others had sought to take their body across
data lines, to cross boundaries and distances to see where bodies, machines
and databases intersect, to see what could be found in letting go of the
edges of ourselves. Perhaps, as Rebecca Solnit writes: “Getting lost is
about the unfamiliar appearing.”

First, I found Diane, or more specifically, dianegoesforyou.com. Describing
herself as a “living search engine”, Diane (real name Diane Rabreau) is a
service solely for individuals. A person, who Diane has never met, marks a
point of curiosity on a satellite image on Google Maps and asks a single
question, such as: “What is there at the end of that road?” or “Is it
possible to hide under this roof?” (as previous players have asked), and
Diane will travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to find out (funds
permitting). Diane then records videos and takes photos so you can see if
there are, as you wondered, salamanders under that rock you saw from your
couch, from your own view from space. Search engines are unimaginably fast.
On a deep level, it is still incomprehensible to us that we are able to
find out so much at the touch of a button, or to see the other side of the
world from so far away.

The dream of technology, the one that is less scarred by the ruins of
capitalism, still wonders at the fact that we can send messages in seconds,
that our images can appear elsewhere, that we can be in two places at once,
that our body can cross oceans in seconds. We are captivated by those that
make journeys meant for non-human things. Henry “Box” Brown was the first
person to mail himself across America, thus freeing himself from slavery in
1849, but W. Reginald Bray was the first to do so in order to test the
infrastructure of the system itself. After successfully posting a bee and
then an elephant, Bray posted himself in 1900, though it’s not clear how
long it took or how many people were required to transport him to his final
destination. What I think of now, when I think of Bray, is the early days
of the postal service whose rules he was flagrantly exploiting with his
eccentricity: he was known for trying to get letters delivered by just
placing an image of its location on the front. At that time, of course, the
system was small enough that it was easy to see its edges, and one could
easily explain how a letter was sent. However, in our contemporary reality,
explaining how a message reaches us feels like explaining a modern miracle.
We fall into analogy as soon as we hit any degree of complexity.

Back in 2016, writer and artist Ingrid Burrington aimed to trace the
physical infrastructure and major data centres of Amazon’s monstrous Amazon
Web Services network, which, as of 2019, powered around 48% of the world’s
public cloud infrastructure, via the United States. She drove to Northern
Virginia—where many of the centres controlling the major AWS sites are
located—as a starting point, and set off from 

[NetBehaviour] 📣🕵️ FurtherList No.18 - March 6th 2020⠀

[marc.garrett via NetBehaviour]

📣🕵️ FurtherList No.18 - March 6th 2020⠀
⠀
The latest FurtherList is out now! Find it at furtherfield.org and discover 
things reflecting the dynamic culture we are part of in the fields of art, 
technology, and social change. 🌏 ⠀
⠀
Please check it out & share!
https://buff.ly/2vIQsn0
⠀
FurtherList is a regular feature sharing exhibitions, events, conferences, 
books, articles, interviews, and other interesting things from our communities, 
the web and beyond. Collected by the ever curious Marc Garrett, co-Artistic 
Director of Furtherfield.

Catch up or look back at previous editions:
furtherfield.org/the-furtherlist-archives/___
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour