Class 4 | Assignment | System Thinking | Written Response
Artist | Trevor Peglan
Under the Beach (Tumon Bay, Guam) By Trevor Paglan
I did not know how lucky I was when my friends persuaded me to go to a conference called “Deep Cables: Uncovering the Wiring of the World” in Berlin a few months back in June before I came to ITP. The conference was about government surveillance, mass surveillance, and Nasa tapping our fiber optic cables, a topic that I’ve never really interested in until now.
I found Paglen’s talk to be the most eye-opening and interesting out of all the speakers. He showed several works like the Trinity Cube (2015) and the Autonomy Cube (2014) which none of these caught my attention until he introduced a project that he literally geared up to deep sea dive in search of physical cables at the bottom of the ocean.
Documentation of NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Miami Beach, Florida, United State, 2015. By Trevor Paglen
Paglen showed enlightening series of photographs and videos where he follows a map, node map of where the server buildings are. These infrastructures actually exist pattern in different cities, in remote areas but in fact in plain sight. You simply have to go look for them. What these buildings have in common are that they are big in size, located in remote areas(near beaches), small towns but they are equipped with massive cooling systems, have proper built gates and barriers to keep people out, and most importantly is there are cameras everywhere. These cameras are not pointing outwards but in fact pointing back into the buildings, entrances or windows. These headquarters are usually unmanned as well. He then showed physical cables that came out of the ground (sand) into the ocean. These cables are not directly coming out of the servers buildings but they are very close to each other. Then he follows these cables from the start (from one country)to the end (to another country) under the ocean, photographs them and even with fish chewing and feeding off of the cables.
NSA-Tapped Undersea Cables, North Pacific Ocean, 2016. By Trevor Paglen.
I learned the meaning of the “cloud” from this conference, of how the internet operates and function before I did not care and as long as my internet is working fine I’m happy. I owed my friends in Berlin a big Thank you that they took me this conference, because who would have thought that I would be learning about System Thinking in Art Strategies class and found that Trevor Paglen was one of the artists I’ve already encountered with system thinking because I would have never known and seen it from this point of view.
This is the conference I went to in Berlin.
DEEP CABLES - Uncovering the Wiring of the World.
The Creator's Project's Deep web Dive:
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/video/trevor-paglen-deep-web-dive-behind-the-scenes