My grandfather clicks a picture of pink flowers and sends it to me as a WhatsApp message.
The internet router is a black box and within is a metallic ecosystem
Outside his house is a moss covered stone carved with letters OFC. Underneath it are optical fiber cables.
The computer center has blue cables that direct messages within a small neighbourhood, known as the Ethernet, and yellow ones carry my grandfather’s message outside to the Reliance local office (network providers)
The Reliance local office receives the message and sends it through its local backbone of over head towers and underground cables
It reaches the coast of Chennai
Reaches the Meta Data centerin Singapore
It passes through a submarine tube in the Indian Ocean
Singapore is the only Meta center in Asia
It passes through a submarine tube in the North Pacific Ocean
Cables like the Bitfrost and Echo carry the message to the West Coast
In Rhode Island the network is containted in overhead towers.
I recieve my grandfathers message in 2.48 seconds
About
When we think of the internet, we often imagine immediacy. An action answered by a reaction at the speed of light. This is true. But it is also true that the internet is a physical place, entangled with everything else that is material - the soil, the sky, the water and the bodies we inhabit. This project tries to comprehend that vast human invention through a single, intimate gesture: a photo of pink flowers sent to me by my grandfather, traveling from Kozhikode to Providence. I follow that message’s path — through observation, walks across the city, conversations with experts, and lots of secondary research. I try to learn where the internet actually is around me. It turns out to be everywhere. Sometimes it runs underground. Sometimes it's inside an anonymous metal box. Sometimes it stands in plain sight, disguised as a neat row of trees along a sidewalk. The website is a horizontal-scrolling field of inquiry meant to reveal some of these material realities.
