Landscapes
That the internet is not as wireless and intangible as we experience it today serves as the subject for this work by Evan Roth. With ‘Red Lines’, he began to visit places in 2014 where undersea fibre-optic cables for the internet come ashore. The series began with a pilgrimage to the remote county of Cornwall, at the south-western tip of England, where transatlantic cables emerge from the ocean.
Roth’s project now consists of 53 separate network videos filmed in eight countries on six continents, the shortest being 3 minutes and 26 seconds and the longest 19 minutes and 48 seconds, totalling more than 12 hours.
Evan Roth uses his exploration of the physical traces of the Internet to gain a better understanding of the cultural shifts caused by the increasing demands that technology imposes on us. The installation ‘Landscapes’ at Artphy is an archived version of ‘Red Lines’ and shows video fragments that were originally hosted online from servers in the countries or cities where they were shot. The images were recorded with a modified camera, which works with the same infrared frequency used by fibre-optic cables. Contemplative images in the tradition of romantic painting were created in this way, and the ‘intangible’ Internet is given a physical and scenic form.
made possible by Artangel and Creative Capital
