Transatlantic Visions - Exploration.135
Interation #2
In collaboration with Max Boutin and Marc-André Cossette
Hexagram and Geotop
At the intersection of media arts and marine geosciences, the installation Transatlantic Visions, part of the doctoral project Exploration.135, explores our perceptive relationship to the world and to technological interconnectivity, based on the Internet's current undersea infrastructure. Evoked as the backbone of our global connectivity, this vast network of fiber-optic cables seems just as imperceptible, alluding to a mostly inaccessible and as yet unknown environment, while continuing to open up a broader reflection on the opacity of digital materialism and its infrastructural terrestrial relationship.
This installation process is based on a computer program specifically designed to explore the topography of this vast network of submarine cables, its connectivity with the coastline and its visualization process in the exhibition space, in interaction with technological residues and sedimentary material taken directly from cores drilled from the seabed.
These visualizations are based on submarine cable data relating to Telegeography's online map and samples, some of which come from the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) in the Atlantic.
The cable routes become an investigative framework for exploring our relationship with hyperconnectivity and the terrestrial landscape, interwoven with microfossils from the seabed, which are considered in marine science to be essential bio-indicators of climate change.
Entitled Sonder le monde, the current version of this computer program is based on some twenty cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean, including:
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Greenland Connect (2009, 4,580km)
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Exa North and South (2001, 12,200km)
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Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1) (1998, 14,301km)
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EXA Express (2015, 4,600km)
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Havfrue/AEC-2 (2020, 7650km)
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AEC-1 (2016, 5,521km)
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Amitie (2023, 6,792km)
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Tata TGN-Atlantic (2001, 13,000km)
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Apollo (2003, 13,000km)
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Yellow (2000, 7,001km)
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FLAG Atlantic-1 (FA-1) (2001, 14,500km)
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Grace Hopper (2022, 7191km)
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MAREA (2018, 6,605km)
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Dunant (2021, 6400km)
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GlobeNet (2000, 23,500km)
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Monet (2017, 10,556km)
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South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) (2018, 6,165km)
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South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) (2020, 5,800km)
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EllaLink (2021, 6,200km)
In a random way, this program allows the spatial interconnection (between several screens and projections) of the luminous trace of the undersea topography of the path of a teletransmission cable with the morphing projection of satellite images of the landing sites of this same cable with the coastline and their metric information in real time.
As well as observations of residual technological matter and fossilized micro-organisms using various microscopy techniques at the marine micropalaeontology laboratory of Géotop, the inter-university research center on Earth system dynamics at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
- Dinocyst
- Copper
- Rubber
- Diatoms
This installation then acts as an instrument probing the materiality of the technological infrastructure functioning in symbiosis and constant interaction with the oceanic ecosystem and the terrestrial environment. This new iteration is designed with a sound device inspired by the white noise of undersea or space exploration vehicles and the sonar used in echo sounding to map the ocean floor.
