Landing Sites

As part of a larger project looking at the material infrastructures of the internet and mass surveillance, I located and photographed some of the primary “choke points” on the internet backbone – places where multiple undersea cables reach land and connect the continents together.

Each photograph had two “rules”: first, the conjunction of internet cables had to be within the image’s frame; second, the horizon line is in the center of the image. These are probably the most abstract images I have ever made for the simple reason that the infrastructures I’m trying to photograph are generally nowhere to be seen in the images themselves – the cables I’m ostensibly photographing are underwater and under the beaches.

For another series of photographs, I learned how to scuba dive and literally and figuratively ‘dove into’ these landscapes to find the internet’s undersea cables.