Points of Presence

• In Event: Making and Doing

Abstract

Few users of social media and mobile devices recognise how their everyday swipes, likes, and retweets mobilises a global megastructure that spans the earth, impacts ecologies, and plunges under the sea. This experimental 20-minute video submerges the audience in the socio-ecological tangles of the materiality of the internet. It shows what can been seen and mediates the unseen. The video focuses not on the consumerism surrounding digital culture but rather on the symbiotic relationship between information infrastructure and the geographic, geologic, oceanographic, and atmospheric elements, immersing the audience in the textures, sounds, vertical vision, of the digital ecology of the North Atlantic. 'Points of Presence', through tracing several undersea cables, reveals how the internet is a material political object intertwined with the natural environment, human labour, and the mobility of data.

The film was shot by Adam Fish (Lancaster University) and Bradley L. Garrett (University of Sydney) in Iceland, Faroe Islands, Shetland Islands, and London. It was edited by Adam Fish and Oliver Case (both Lancaster University) Bradley L. Garrett (University of Sydney). The score is by Jon Christopher Nelson at the University of North Texas College of Music.

I propose to archive this video in addition to the raw footage that shows from the drone's perspective every landing site for the undersea fibre optical cables between Iceland and Scotland and Denmark.

Author

• Adam Fish, University of New South Wales