DARKFIBER

Essays by:

Ingrid Burrington for Creative Time Reports Lindsey FrenchCameron HuThe Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)

Edited by Marissa Lee Benedict & David Rueter and published for the closing of Dark Fiber at the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL)

March 26 2015

a companion guide to interpreting internet infrastructure

Excerpted from the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Winter 2014 newsletter “THE LAY OF THE LAND”

NETWORKED NATIONTHE LANDSCAPE OF THE INTERNET IN AMERICA

An Equinix data center in Ashburn, Virginia, at the heart of the cloud. CLUI photo

NETWORKED NATION: THE Landscape of the Internet in America was presented at the Center’s Los Angeles exhibit space in late 2013, examining the physical internet in the USA. The project looked at the roots, vines, and concrete of information-space, from AT&T through NSFnet, and early commercial network access points in places like Tysons Corner, Virginia. It ended with a survey of the dedicated data centers being built in office parks and remote locations by the major internet companies today, to house the cloud.

When commercial and individual access to digital communication networks opened in the early 1990s, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, navigated through things like AOL and the Mosaic browser, it dematerialized the information space that had been enabled by the desktop publishing revolution. The physical flurry of print–newsletters, magazines, reports–sublimated into their genetic code.

This endlessly growing line of code, which now includes the majority of communications, visualizations, and data, can be seen in aggregate as the liquid flow of digital information, flooding over the landscape, following channels and rivulets that are physical wires, laid first by the phone companies.

The first transcontintental telephone line was completed when the last splice was made, at the border of Utah and Nevada, in the town of Wendover, in 1914. A monument with an old telephone pole marks the spot, outside the Montego Bay casino. CLUI photo

Commercial Internet Nodes

An office building at 8100 Boone Boulevard in Tysons Corner, Virginia, was the original Metropolitan Area Exchange for the eastern United States, with half the nation’s internet traffic passing through it in the early 1990s. Today it is still a well-connected data center in the region of the Dulles Corridor, the highest concentration of internet infrastructure in the nation. CLUI photo

Though the early open internet was located on servers all over the place, connected to phone lines through modems, and to each other within buildings with routers, there were a few places where it converged and collected, where concentrations of the network linked to thick parts of the communications backbone.

Server rack space is desirable close to these points, such as meet me rooms, where main fiber lines converge, often in buildings near or at phone company central offices (COs) in major metropolitan centers, especially in Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and the Dulles Corridor of Virginia, near the Pentagon, where the internet was born. These hubs emerged early on, and remain important gateways for the communications web of the world, even as it spreads further outwards.

Fiber Line Proliferation

The Manchester Cable Station in Northern California is one of a few dozen trans-oceanic fiber optic cable landing stations along the East and West Coasts. CLUI photo

Fiber optic cables carry the load of digital communications across the city, the country, and the world. These are the wires of the wired world (although the last mile–to the door of the consumer–is mostly still either a copper phone line carrying DSL, a coaxial cable owned by the cable company, or a satellite dish on a roof or apartment balcony).

When the dot-com bubble grew in the late 1990s, so did anticipation for the need for bandwidth. Dozens of communication infrastructure companies formed and ballooned in acquisition frenzies. Some even laid tens of thousands of miles of fiber, then collapsed in spectacular bankruptcies in 2001 and 2002, including the biggest of them, WorldCom and Global Crossing. Today the internet is moving into the glut of bandwidth created ten years ago and new lines are being installed across the country.

The U.S. is connected to the world primarily through a few dozen points on the East and West Coast of the country where fiber-optic submarine cables emerge from the sea floor and connect to the inland network. Most of these cables were laid during the telco boom, between 1997 and 2002. A few cables across the Pacific have been laid since then, including the Unity/EAC-Pacific, largely funded by Google, which lands in Redondo Beach, California, and terminates at the One Wilshire building in downtown Los Angeles.

Satellites and Cable Television

The Echostar satellite facility in Gilbert, Arizona, is one of the company’s largest uplink sites. Echostar operates several earthstations in the USA for its network of communication satellites, serving video and data transmission customers. CLUI photo

Not all national and international internet traffic is handled by fiber optic systems. Some of it travels via satellite and coaxial cables, systems primarily developed and operated by television broadcast and cable companies. Television has been a major driver for expanding telecommunication networks. Even the 1950s AT&T long line network carried television content as well as voice and data.

Today’s cable TV company systems are increasingly used for data traffic, and are likely to be more so as the line between video and data continues to blur. Cable companies like Time Warner and Comcast provide many consumers with the last-mile connection to the internet, and are now the largest telcom companies, behind only Verizon and AT&T.

Since the first communications satellite launched in 1962 (AT&Ts Telstar 1), television has favored space-based relay systems. Despite their lower bandwidth, the continuous stream of video information, transmitted over great distances, has been a better

match for the medium. Satellites parked in space and rotating with the earth receive content from powerful uplink facilities and then beam it back to earth, generally non-directionally. (The signal can be collected anywhere on the ground with line of sight of the satellite).

This is done at cable company head-end facilities, where the signals are captured by parabolic collectors, and transmitted regionally via their cable network and by regional fiber networks. In the case of direct broadcast companies like DishTV, the signal is received directly by the end user through small dishes outside attached to consumer modems and cable boxes.

Dedicated Data Centers

Terramark Data Center at 2970 Corvin Street, in Santa Clara, California, one of the dozens of new data plants in the city. CLUI photo

While data centers have tended to collect in pre-existing, partially occupied downtown buildings, near telco fiber connection points, a new type of structure is now spreading across the land: buildings wholly dedicated to housing digital data. These dedicated data centers exist in converted or rebuilt buildings in suburban office parks, and, increasingly, are built from scratch.

They are built by the companies dominating the internet now, like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. They are also being built by data center developers, like Sabey, CoreSite, Digital Realty Trust, and Equinix.

Data centers are clustering around one another in suburbs and in remote locations (instead of downtowns, near their customers), to take advantage of inexpensive real estate, but also for proximity to sources of electrical power and fiber bandwidth.

It’s a new kind of physical information architecture: windowless boxes, often with distinct design features such as an appliqué of surface graphics or a functional brutalism, surrounded by cooling systems. A building that is a machine, tended by a small staff of technicians and security guards.

This is likely the future of the physical internet, where information storage is like an electrical utility, plugged into hydropower, cooled by river water, and connected by long wires to users around the world. Not a power plant, but a data plant. ♦

Networked Nation: The Landscape of the Internet in America was supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

ABOUT THE CENTER

“Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, and in finding new meanings in the intentional and incidental forms that we individually and collectively create. We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription, that can be read to better understand who we are, and what we are doing.

The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has produced dozens of exhibits on land use themes and regions, for public institutions all over the United States, as well as overseas. The Center publishes books, conducts public tours, and offers information and research resources through its library, archive, and website.

The CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use—the many perspectives of the landscape—into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.

END OF THE LINE

Cameron Hu

For several months in 2007 I cut trees for the State of Arizona, in forests just north of the Mexican border. It was an objectively good job, probably the last one of my life. Labor crews paid no rent and the work was so remote and dispersed that our bosses could not know how little work we actually did. The era of ubiquitous drone surveillance was still a few years off, even in that frontier of purported “national security concern.” Today’s newly militarized Forest Service would have captured a lot of hi-res aerial footage of us loafing about the woods and throwing rocks at each other.

Some nights we would drive twenty-five miles into the nearby town of Globe and wander its deserted downtown. It was an unsettling place, seven or eight blocks of boarded-up neoclassical banks and art deco churches rising out of the desert for no obvious good reason. Fantastic wealth had once come to town and then deserted it just as quickly. Globe was anachronistic, its overwhelming appearance that of being past (in time) and of being passed-over (in space) as capital roams across and recomposes the Earth.

We looked it up. Prospectors first discovered small deposits of silver around Globe in 1875, and after the silver was gone they began to mine copper. The resource frontier came, left, and returned again. For a brief and ecstatic period in the 1900s, Globe’s Old Dominion Copper Company was one of the world’s wealthiest mining enterprises. It turned copper and labor into wealth, and parts of that wealth into reasonable facsimiles of the architectural forms favored by the European bourgeoisie. In the twentieth century Americans required a lot of copper, hundreds of millions of tons of the stuff, much of it to wire electricity through ornate towns like Globe that they would later abandon.

It so happens that copper was for some time also the unrivaled medium for telecommunications, first for the telegraph, then the telephone, then early iterations of what we came to call the Internet. The Defense Department’s ARPANET, the computational network that formed the basis for the Web, began with one device in Los Angeles connected to another in Palo Alto by copper wire. But by the late eighties a small revolution was underway. Laboratory synthesis began to displace open-pit extraction, at least for the production of our increasingly infomatic lives. Miles of fiber-optic cable stretched across continents and underneath oceans, and brought with them fiber-optic’s idiosyncratic regimes of labor, territory, and control. By that point the Old Dominion mine had long since closed. The frontier was elsewhere.

The historian Reinhart Kosselleck observed that as late as the seventeenth century ordinary Europeans had no expectation of substantive novelty in their lifetimes or in those of their children. Accumulated experience could already account for whatever might come. By contrast the distinguishing condition of modernist culture — emergent alongside drastic transformations of the natural sciences, capitalist economy, and political form — was to expect that one’s life would be constantly revolutionized. We were all accelerating into something fresh, something unknown.

What Koselleck does not mention, and what has only started to make itself felt in the last decades, is that a world constantly revolutionized is also a world increasingly filled with the debris of previous revolutions. It is regrettable that we speak of the new resources, technologies, and places as “replacing” the old ones, because the latter usually persist somewhere, just out of view, in phases of obsolescence and

abandonment. Under conditions of modernist culture every new thing must one day be future junk. And it is a peculiarity of late capitalism that the period between which the new emerges and is discarded seems to be shrinking. Who in the nineteenth century could have imagined that future humans would happily build and scrap the same suburb within a handful of years?

Our talk of opening “frontiers,” territorial, techno-scientific, or otherwise imagines the new as if it took form within an empty expanse. The absolute geometry of an open-pit mine spiraling into the earth or, say, a fiber-optic cable stretched across it doesn’t help much. The purity of such abstraction tends to remake its environment as if a formless and ahistorical wilderness. And this in turn would indicate that the new infrastructures are themselves final, permanent, infinite. But empty space was never more than an imperial fantasy, and new forms of extraction and production belong at once to a landscape of colonial dispossession and of dead places and projects whose decline was once equally unimaginable as their own— abandoned factories, derelict mines, train tracks overgrown with weeds.

One of the achievements of Dark Fiber is that its ostensibly modernist gesture — to draw an information-age line across the globe, to dematerialize ordinary experience yet further — ironically focuses our gaze on the unavoidable and untidy material remains of the industrial world. A world that, like Globe, AZ, is not in truth the past but our present.

Cameron Hu is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research concerns time, ecology, and liberal political form in North America and Southeast Asia. Recent essays on aesthetic culture have appeared or are forthcoming in CMagazine, On Site Review, and Frieze.

Reprinted from Creative Time Reports (May 20, 2014)

THE CLOUD IS NOT THE TERRITORYIngrid Burrington

Arguing that the public has a right to understand internet infrastructure, artist Ingrid Burrington visits “the cloud”—the data centers of northern Virginia through which two-thirds of internet traffic currently circulates.

View of Washington Redskins training camp across from data center construction site, Ashburn, Va. Photo by the author, 2013.

The NSA has your data. Facebook has your data. Google has your data. By now these are familiar tropes in a familiar debate. Rarely in that debate, however, does anyone actually explain where the NSA, Facebook or Google keeps your data. The usual shorthand is “in the cloud”—which is to say on a server somewhere, connected to other servers. While technically accurate, this highly marketed metaphor hardly sheds light on where our data resides. One imagines metadata floating, like a thought bubble in a comic strip, away from a personal computer to some impossible destination that is at once everywhere and nowhere in particular. But information about our habits, contacts and preferences must live somewhere. Last fall I decided to go see where.

Going to data centers to understand mass surveillance is, admittedly, like studying rook design to understand chess. These storage spaces are just one piece of an apparatus; data accrues meaning as it’s used, and we tend to forget the significance of how it’s stored. But internet infrastructure is in specific places for specific reasons: natural resources, local politics, economics and even the history of the internet itself. The hidden geography of data is folded into a larger terrain of corporate and state power. I hoped that learning more about the former might offer some insight into how we perceive—and potentially challenge—the latter.

First, I had to figure out which data centers to scope out. The companies that operate these spaces vary widely in their approaches to transparency. Some are very open, allowing clients to tour the facilities, while others are much more secretive, citing security concerns, and don’t even provide public addresses. My itinerary was shaped by an interest in two companies: Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT), a real estate company dedicated to building office properties and data centers for defense contractors, and Amazon, which has fundamentally changed how people live on the internet—and where the internet lives. Convenience and history led both companies, and me, to northern Virginia.

Northern Virginia is home to the Dulles Technology Corridor, a region named for its international airport and its many defense and technology contractors. Partly because of its proximity to Department of Defense outposts, by the early 1990s the region was already home to a major piece of internet backbone, the network of fiber optic trunk lines and core routers that directs data through the web. In 1992 Virginia’s Loudoun County became home to MAE-East, one of the first internet exchange (IX) points. Being close to the backbone and to an IX buys data centers milliseconds of advantage over competitors. In an industry obsessed with efficiency, milliseconds matter.

Loudoun County offers a number of incentives to data centers: a brochure notes that local power rates for industrial use are 28 percent below the national average, and Virginia offers retail and use-tax exemptions for “computer equipment, chillers, and backup generators.” Data centers have contributed to the region’s tax base; according to 2012 census data, Loudoun County had the highest median income in the United States (among counties with a population of 65,000 or greater), at $118,934 per year. An estimated 70 percent of internet traffic goes through Loudoun County’s 5.2 million square feet of data centers every day.

While the bizarre office temples I previously visited in Maryland’s National Business Park at least hinted at human life, the Virginia landscape revealed architecture and aesthetics optimized for machines. My presence would have been disruptive were it not so obviously diminutive; to these inscrutable black boxes of information and the sprawling landscape that they inhabit, I was a forgettable data point passing through an infinite stream.

The first data center I sought out was DC-6, a colocation data center in Manassas, Va.—an independent city just south of Loudon County—purchased by COPT in 2010. A video of DC-6 shows selective glimpses of the data center’s interior, where men (only men) perform “mission critical” work with diligence and ease. Having first seen the location in satellite map views, I was surprised by the rambling topography and sheer scale of the compound. There were no other businesses within easy walking distance. Road construction hummed around the bend. The isolation of the site and its giant black gates were intimidating, leading me to photograph from a distance. These lonely data center aesthetics do serve one human demographic: prospective tenants of the colocation center, touring the facilities, seeking proof that their data will be safe with COPT. DC-6’s isolated location and heavy fortification signify security and secrecy, which presumably extend from its gates to its server racks. (Of course I was never able to confirm this.)

The DC-6 in Manassas, VA. Photo by the author, 2013.

Manassas Battlefield, Virginia. Photo by the author, 2013

After visiting DC-6, I took a brief detour to Manassas National Battlefield Park, a site commemorating the first battle of the American Civil War. Manassas was also the original code name for the NSA counter-encryption program known as Bullrun, named after another Civil War battle. Again I was struck by the uneasy resonance of the surveillance landscape, where large pieces of infrastructure in the new global battlefield are adjacent to battlefields from a very different conflict. It makes a weird kind of sense for catacombs of data to reside in a region full of ghosts.

In January 2013 COPT announced that it had purchased a 34-acre site in Loudon County, Va., for $14 million. Amazon was to be its primary tenant. In March 2013 Amazon announced that it had secured a $600 million contract with the CIA to provide the intelligence agency cloud computing services. Since the CIA contract is for private services within existing CIA data centers, it’s unlikely that this center under construction is “the” CIA-Amazon data center. However, Amazon job descriptions for engineering operations technicians in Ashburn, Va., require applicants to “obtain and maintain a Top Secret security clearance with Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) eligibility and access” (a requirement not included on listings for the same position in other cities). Perhaps COPT’s new Amazon data center is slated to be part of AWS GovCloud—cloud services that Amazon Web Services has designed to meet specific U.S. government compliance standards (like the International Traffic in Arms Regulations).

Ashby Ponds Senior Living Community, Ashburn, Va. Photo by the author, 2013.

A brochure advertising the parcel of Ashburn land highlights the site’s many benefits for data center construction, including its proximity to three power substations and a transmission line, as well as the Loudoun County water plant, which offers “reclaimed water available for cooling systems on-site.” The property is also extremely close to several internet exchanges and other data centers.

A recent article about COPT’s data centers indicates that the first part of the compound has been built, but when I visited the site, it was still mostly dirt. In a lot across from the site, a strangely suburban condominium complex was going up. The new buildings were part of Ashby Ponds, an assisted-living community. It made some sense that new housing would be for the retired and not a workforce. COPT’s new construction is estimated to bring $300 million in investment to Loudoun County but only 45 jobs.

Ashby Ponds Senior Living Community, Ashburn, Va. Photo by the author, 2013.

This construction boom isn’t welcomed by everyone. Western Loudoun County is a more rural area, connected to Virginia’s agriculture industry. In 2005 there was talk of the western part of the county seceding from Loudoun because of zoning-law changes that threatened to expand development. Advocates of secession eventually backed off, but conflict over development continues to divide the county.

The construction shaping the landscape of northern Virginia is instrumental to the landscape of the internet itself, but it’s not easy to draw a line from the physical properties where the web is maintained to news stories about mass data collection. What’s at stake for people living in data center growth regions—their homes, jobs and way of life—feels worlds away from political arguments about what’s being done with the data in those centers. And yet these conflicts are connected, by strands of fiber optic cable and by the strange faith that the physical growth of an increasingly concentrated and controlled network will somehow lead to economic growth benefiting the general public.

Data center construction site, Ashburn Va. Photo by the author, 2013.

Shortly before I ventured on this trip, I got a message from a friend saying that he might have found an Amazon data center in Virginia. He sent me some coordinates and provided an outline of his methods, which involved geolocating IP addresses found via the command-line tool trace-route (borrowing a page from the artist James Bridle) and an errant label somehow still on Google Maps: a building in Sterling, Va., bearing the name “Amazon-Vadata.” (Vadata is a legal entity owned by Amazon, essentially the corporate handle for its data centers.)

Although I thought of this as one of the more intimidating sites on my itinerary, it proved to be the smallest and the closest to a semblance of civilization. It was next to a pet resort, down the road from a mall, and a short drive away from Raytheon offices. No signs identified the building’s tenant. The only logos I noticed were those of Caterpillar, which were on the generators, and Allied Barton, which was on the badge of the security guard who eventually asked me to stop taking photos. This more or less concluded the day’s expedition.

What is probably an Amazon data center, Sterling, Va. You can’t see the pet resort next door in this photo, but it is called Olde Town Pet Resort. Photo by the author, 2013.

External generators, air conditioning units, and a surveillance camera at what is probably an Amazon data center, Sterling, Va. Photo by the author, 2013.

Entrance to what is probably an Amazon data center, Sterling, Va. Near the center right you can barely see the security guard who asked me to leave. Photo by the author, 2013.

I returned home and retraced my steps with my phone, which had been quietly collecting my location data all day and sending it to a Google server somewhere, possibly in northern Virginia. While I had struggled to seek out pieces of the cloud, the cloud kept a pretty good pulse on my location.

Users accept this information asymmetry in part because of a misunderstanding: they believe that the internet does not take up space and, since it doesn’t take up real space, that our data isn’t really somewhere else or in the hands of someone else. But by placing our data in the cloud, and in the hands of private companies that readily comply with national security directives and sell our data to third parties, it’s effectively no longer ours.

Data takes up space. The space it takes up—and the water, land and electricity that get used in taking it up—remains, for the most part, out of sight, out of mind and utterly uninteresting to actually look at. There are exceptions to this inaccessibility, in particular the Internet Archive, which has installed its servers within its public community space. Such exceptions to the rule illustrate that the veneer of secrecy around data center geography is a choice, one that further estranges users from their own data.

nternet Archive founder Brewster Kahle shows people around the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Still from Archive, 2012, a documentary by Jonathan Minard.

Lifting the fog that surrounds the cloud isn’t a matter merely of locating many nondescript buildings but of looking at all the other elements that make its many particles crystallize. Mass surveillance in the United States is a complex public-private partnership, and the data-industrial complex is but one of its sprawling pieces. Beneath headlines about the spooks of the surveillance state are normal, nonspooky humans in normal, nonspooky places—engineers working at colocation centers used by defense contractors, county economic development offices looking to expand the local tax base, real estate companies looking to get into a new market, energy companies that welcome the profits born of an industry that uses more electricity than some small nations.

None of these normal, nonspooky humans are directly responsible for the rise of mass surveillance, but they are instrumental in maintaining the surveillance apparatus. None of the infrastructure that they work with has to, by design, function as an instrument of surveillance. Funding for government cloud infrastructure could prioritize uses other than the intelligence community and law enforcement (like the use of AWS cloud services by NASA to make climate data sets publicly available). Companies could be compelled by regulatory bodies to treat privacy as a user’s right and not as an optional commodity. Internet infrastructure could be treated like the actual infrastructure it is—like highways, like water management, like food safety, like something that the public has a right to understand and that its proprietors have a responsibility to explain transparently.

In trying to see where data lives, I hoped to better understand how we live with data and, by extension, with the myriad forms of surveillance that it enables. We live with data by pretending that we don’t. The opacity of internet infrastructure and policy—and the insistence that ideally users shouldn’t need to see or understand either—occludes data, the institutions that hold it and the power they exercise with it. Ultimately, in a geography of power, the cloud is not the territory.

This piece was produced in partnership with Waging Nonviolence.

Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps and tells jokes about places, politics and the weird feelings people have about both. She lives on a small island off the coast of America. Her work can be found at www.lifewinning.com

Creative Time Reports strives to be a global leader in publishing the unflinching and provocative perspectives of artists on the most challenging issues of our times. We distribute this content to the public and media free of charge.

Asserting that culture and the free exchange of ideas are at the core of a vibrant democracy, Creative Time Reports aims to publish dispatches that speak truth to power and upend traditional takes on current issues. We believe that artists play a crucial role as thought leaders in society, and are uniquely capable of inspiring and encouraging a more engaged and informed public, whether they are addressing elections or climate change, censorship or immigration, protest movements or politically motivated violence.

In an era of unprecedented interconnectedness, Creative Time Reports provides artists with a space to voice analysis and commentary on issues too often overlooked by mainstream media. We believe in the importance of highlighting cultural producers’ distinctive viewpoints on world events and urgent issues of social justice to ensure a livelier, more nuanced and more imaginative public debate.

The views expressed by artists and authors contributing to Creative Time Reports are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Creative Time. Creative Time is committed to free expression and supports artists in their efforts to move the needle of social justice by revealing new ways of looking at and understanding our world.

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We view nonviolence as neither a fixed ideology nor merely a collection of strategies. It is not passivity or the avoidance of conflict. Rather, “waging nonviolence” is the active pursuit of a better, less violent society by means worthy of the goal and those best suited to achieving it. WNV welcomes a diversity of voices and viewpoints that seek alternatives to violence through people power.

EARTHLY ANALOGS

Lindsey French

Like any form of communication, the internet is insistently physical. Reconsidering the architecture of our current communications systems within a biological context, we brush against the edges of observation. At the limits of our perception, conversations await in which we operate not as subject, but as mediators in exchanges beyond our full comprehension. In recontextualizing a human role as one of mediation, we are offered a practice of humility, alternative to the consuming responsibilities prescribed by the Anthropocene. Conceiving of intelligences beyond ourselves, and even parallel to ourselves, we have the opportunity to consider ourselves not as sole agents of change for the planet, but as individuals carrying meaning from one place to the next. Dark Fiber activates an analog of communication within the landscape.

Like any form of communication, the internet is insistently physical, but our current vocabulary expresses a vocabulary of disembodiment. The ‘e-’ in email and ebook emphasizes electricity, and as a prefix its homonym declares an opposition. An email is decidedly not mail, an ebook definitely not a book. They are spectral, immaterial traces: shadowy, and charged in opposition to original, solid forms. But the nature of electronic communication is tied up in fiber-optic cables which light up with transmission and solid stacks of heavy hard drives, hot with released energy. With each communication, matter is moved, at speeds and scales not easily witnessed in isolation, but far easier to observe as time elapses, as one might understand the movement of plants through time-lapse photography.

landscape. drill, perception, move

Reconsidering the architecture of our current communications systems within a biological context, we brush against the edges of perception. Biological communication focuses on the transfer of information, and examples span beyond the limitations of human bodily senses. For example, the most thorough studies in plant communication evidence the transfer of information through the release of volatile organic chemicals, to warn nearby plants of predators. Neighboring plants then respond by upping their defenses. This is by no means the full extent of plant communication, but research has prompted a move to term the structures of exchange among plants as systems of intelligence, albeit externalized and delocalized.1 Understanding plant signaling as a delocalized system of intelligence roots our own externalized system of communication in an earthly analog.

most easier cables charged is a change ourselves,

At the limits of our perception, conversations await in which we operate not as subject, but as mediators in exchanges occuring beyond our full comprehension. In Dark Fiber, the human figures take on the role of facilitators, mediating a transfer of communication by slowly laying an infrastructure rather than issuing a message to send, or awaiting a message to be received. The labor of transmission is emphasized with every step, dig, drill, slice, hammer; every act that cuts into the landscape to lay a channel for communication. These actions, while violent in some measure, implicate the human figure in a practice of support, alternative to some of the authoritative responsibilities prescribed by the Anthropocene.

we comprehension. as operate

After decades of pressure to be the managers of the ecosystem, there is a humility in acknowledging oneself not as a dematerialized virtual creature freed from the existence of physicality, but rather, inherently attached to it. Conceiving of intelligences beyond ourselves, and even parallel to ourselves, we have the opportunity to take a breath, participate in labor, and consider ourselves not as sole agents of change for the planet, but as individuals carrying meaning from one place to the next, in direct relation to our landscapes. Dark Fiber, insistently material, enacts an analog of communication with the landscape.

conversation of the of the

Any form of communication is insistently physical. Brushing against the edges of observation, the implications of mediation offer a practice of humility, a paralinguistic utterance alongside the matter of the landscape.

1. For the first comprehensive collection of plant behavior research, and the assertion of the term plant neurobiology, see The First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology, Book of Abstracts. Florence, ITALY, May 17-20, 2005. Accessed March 20, 2015. http://www.plantbehavior.org/files/Symposia_BookofAbstracts.pdf

Lindsey French is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Engaging in gestures of communication with landscapes and the nonhuman, her work spans a variety of media including video, performance, audio sculpture, and generative literature. French has exhibited and presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pico House Gallery at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument in Los Angeles, and in conjunction with the International Symposium of Electronics Arts in Albuquerque. She is a recipient of a Propeller Fund in Chicago as a collaborator with The Plug-In Studio, was a nominee of the 2013 Clare Rosen & Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, and has been an artist in residence at ACRE in Steuben, Wisconsin. French currently teaches courses that explore new media practices and site specific research at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Art and Technology and Contemporary Practices departments.

ABOUT THE CHICAGO ARTISTS COALITION (CAC)

The mission of the Chicago Artists Coalition is to build a sustainable marketplace for entrepreneurial artists and creatives.

As pioneers in advocacy and professional development, we capitalize on the intersection of art and enterprise by activating collaborative partnerships and developing innovative resources. The Chicago Artists Coalition is committed to cultivating groundbreaking exhibitions and educational opportunities, and to building a diverse community of artistic leaders that defines the place of art and artists in our culture and economy.

The Chicago Artists Coalition is a registered 501(c) nonprofit organization. All contributions and donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

chicagoartistscoalition.org

The BOLT Residency is a highly competitive, juried, one-year artist studio residency program offering contemporary emerging artists the opportunity to engage the Chicago arts community and its public in critical dialogue about contemporary art.

The residency provides nine professional open-plan studios and a 500-square-foot, dedicated gallery space. BOLT takes a holistic approach to the development of residents’ artistic careers by providing studio work space, exhibition opportunities and support, professional development, and creative community. BOLT is structured to provide artists with myriad resources and comprehensive support to create, build upon and

sustain a long-term career in the arts.

ABOUT DARK FIBER

Dark Fiber is an inaugural collaboration between Chicago-based artists Marissa Lee Benedict (CAC BOLT Resident & Mentor) and David Rueter.

Streamed into the gallery over a fiber optic cable that makes its way into the gallery from an unknown point of entry, Dark Fiber is a single-channel video projection that explores the construction of an alternative, unauthorized form of internet infrastructure. In the video Benedict & Rueter labor to fabricate – through acts both practical and imagined, factual and fictionalized – a new network that operates alongside, but in the shadows of, the public Internet.

Dark Fiber traces a different approach to network representation, drawing lines that hop between systems and scales, through vast landscapes, industrial infrastructure, media apparatuses, walls and conduits, lived space and imagined worlds. The result is not an understanding delivered whole, but an experience afforded by walking a path.

More information about the piece can be fround at darkfiber.io

Special thanks for the exhibition production go to:

Meghan Moe Beitiks Allyson Benedict Alex Benedict Harry Benedict Lindsey FrenchCLUI (the Center for Land Use Interpretation) & Matt Coolidge Pat ElifritzJeremiah JonesBrian LeeJohn & Patricia LeeJuan Luis OlveraMarc & Anne RueterAndy Tokarski

CAC’s mission and programs are funded by the Alphawood Foundation; Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development; Chicago Community Trust; CityArts; The Coleman Foundation; Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation; Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; Illinois Arts Council Agency; Joan Mitchell Foundation; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; John E. & Jeanne T. Hughes Foundation; The Joyce Foundation; Leveraging Investments in Creativity, Inc. (LINC); The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; and the generosity of members and supporters.