Performance, 500 gigabyte portable hard drive, research material, video
“A Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable” is the first-person account of a visit to the four landing points of a telecommunications cable known as Atlantic Crossing 1, which passes through Fire Island, New York; Sennen Cove, England; Castricum, the Netherlands; and Sylt, Germany. The video assumes the form of the travelogue and freely mixes documentary with fiction. The line between the consumer of text and images and the author is challenged by the collision of original and appropriated content. Chance encounters and associative digressions link the communications cable to political protest, global security, war, the panopticons of Jeremy Bentham and Argus, the urban history of docks and data centers, Sylt’s corrective geology, and the problem of representing global communication structures, whose scale far exceeds that of the individual. The video explores the split reality of the internet—how it can be physically situated in one place yet visually occur in another—and places the individual on a one-to-one ratio with the global communications network.
