<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal">Dear all,<br>I present my <a href="https://flic.kr/s/aHsmLuy8S2">last exhibition</a> and the generous text of Natalie Kane has written to introduce the show. <br><br>All the best</span><span style="font-style:italic;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal">m_m</span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal">s</span><span style="font-style:italic;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-style:italic;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><b>* * *</b></span><span style="font-style:italic;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br><a href="https://www.blueprojectfoundation.org/en/exhibitions/item/unfixed-infrastructures-and-rabbit-holes">Unfixed Infrastructures and Rabbit Holes</a></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif"></span><br>
<span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif">Blueproject
Foundation, Barcelona</span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif"></span><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif"><br>
24.01.20 – 22.03.20</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><a href="https://flic.kr/s/aHsmLuy8S2">Photos</a><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal">* * *<br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span style="font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><div class="element element-textarea element-textareapro"><b>Trace Route </b><br>Natalie Kane. Curator of Digital Design at Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
<p class="gmail-p3">What we understand our body to be, or to exist as, has
been irrevocably complicated by the invention and expansion of the
internet. As a public interacting with technology, we no longer exist as
a singularly stable and defined, edge-bound being, as our data and
lives leak out onto distributed nodes that augment our own sense of self
further than it already is. Where we continue, where we are, even when
we assume to be erased. Where and even <em>when</em> we think we are
not. The perception of our body through information, as information, as a
carrier and creator of information, as a subject of perception and
object of translation. This appears, or rather, is felt as something
media theorist Sun-ha Hong calls the “trace-body”: “When I feel my own
trace-body as an absent presence, I am also experiencing what it feels
like to have machines and databases mediate between me and myself.” A
series of out-of-body experiences constantly overwriting, corrupting,
glitching. We already contend with an unstable sense of self by just
being human, but when faced with a multitude of other possible presences
through the data profiles that we create ourselves, or through those
that are created for and about us (with or without our knowledge) by
corporate or governmental actors, this distribution across time and
space feels necessary to account for through personal acts.</p>
<p class="gmail-p3">When something i<span class="gmail-s1">s lost or leaves us, </span>or
is taken away, we often look. In writing this for Mario, who himself
had taken a journey to find his own trace-body, I looked to where others
had sought to take their body across data lines, to cross boundaries
and distances to see where bodies, machines and databases intersect, to
see what could be found in letting go of the edges of ourselves.
Perhaps, as Rebecca Solnit writes: “Getting lost is about the unfamiliar
appearing.”</p>
<p class="gmail-p3">First, I found Diane, or more specifically, <a href="http://dianegoesforyou.com/"><span class="gmail-s2">dianegoesforyou.com</span></a>.
Describing herself as a “living search engine”, Diane (real name Diane
Rabreau) is a service solely for individuals. A person, who Diane has
never met, marks a point of curiosity on a satellite image on Google
Maps and asks a single question, such as: “What is there at the end of
that road?” or “Is it possible to hide under this roof?” (as previous
players have asked), and Diane will travel hundreds, if not thousands,
of miles to find out (funds permitting). Diane then records videos and
takes photos so you can see if there are, as you wondered, salamanders
under that rock you saw from your couch, from your own view from space.
Search engines are unimaginably fast. On a deep level, it is still
incomprehensible to us that we are able to find out so much at the touch
of a button, or to see the other side of the world from so far away.</p>
<p class="gmail-p3">The dream of technology, the one that is less scarred by
the ruins of capitalism, still wonders at the fact that we can send
messages in seconds, that our images can appear elsewhere, that we can
be in two places at once, that our body can cross oceans in seconds. We
are captivated by those that make journeys meant for non-human things.
Henry “Box” Brown was the first person to mail himself across America,
thus freeing himself from slavery in 1849, but W. Reginald Bray was the
first to do so in order to test the infrastructure of the system itself.
After successfully posting a bee and then an elephant, Bray posted
himself in 1900, though it’s not clear how long it took or how many
people were required to transport him to his final destination. What I
think of now, when I think of Bray, is the early days of the postal
service whose rules he was flagrantly exploiting with his eccentricity:
he was known for trying to get letters delivered by just placing an
image of its location on the front. At that time, of course, the system
was small enough that it was easy to see its edges, and one could easily
explain how a letter was sent. However, in our contemporary reality,
explaining how a message reaches us feels like explaining a modern
miracle. We fall into analogy as soon as we hit any degree of
complexity.</p>
<p class="gmail-p3">Back in 2016, writer and artist Ingrid Burrington aimed to
trace the physical infrastructure and major data centres of Amazon’s
monstrous Amazon Web Services network, which, as of 2019, powered around
48% of the world’s public cloud infrastructure, via the United States.
She drove to Northern Virginia—where many of the centres controlling the
major AWS sites are located—as a starting point, and set off from
there, recording and mapping each site to gain an idea of their
overwhelming influence on the geography. Amazon’s reputation for
withholding and limiting information (e.g., their energy usage
statistics and carbon footprint) extends to the locations and number of
their data centres, both active and inactive, so Burrington found some
of the locations on Foursquare and others through municipal websites and
news stories, such as one that caught fire during its construction in
Ashburn, 30 miles north-west of Washington DC. By physically moving
herself around a landscape that Amazon is carrying out a coordinated
intervention on, Burrington found Northern Virginia to be “the heart of
the internet”, which before that existed as a kind of “spook country…a
constellation of intelligence agencies and defence contractors that went
relatively unnoticed unless you literally landed on their doorstep”.
Though she could not hold up a mirror and see her own data, she could
see where it might move, a possible place where she might exist, even
for a moment. By revealing the invisible infrastructure, the places
where it was made possible, she was able to cut out a layer of the
history and current state of the internet that wasn’t visible from the <span class="gmail-s1">outside, to then</span> see the mundane and banal parts, the labour and people, and the moving and broken parts. <span class="gmail-s1">A journey that facilitated a slowing down, just enough to see.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3">In writing his email to me commissioning this text, Mario
Santamaria outlined the details of his journey following the route of
his own data: “Barcelona> Switzerland> Stockholm> Milan>
Perugia> Bergamo. A 50 millisecond trip in 14 days.” In attempting to
trace himself through the wilderness of an expanded and distributed
data landscape, Mario was enacting a form of time displacement,
navigating a body through a trace route, with a journey never intended
for a body, but one which is visited by many, augmented and created by
many hands. This journey, like Burrington’s and Rabreau’s, is a
technological mimicry of sorts, the points of arrival and departure much
like the computational counterpart of the trace route, but with the
true nature of its permeability as unknown and indistinguishable as a
complex system can ever be, be it human or technological. However, the
latter’s reasons for complexity are less a matter of the psyche than a
matter of the hyperobject of capitalism.</p>
<p class="gmail-p3">In <em>The Second Body</em>, Daisy Hildyard argues that
“the body exists at different scales”, and speaks of realising the
“horror which apparently comes from the fact that your body is a
physical thing with porous boundaries”. When imagining our lives
alongside the technological, we perhaps envisioned a slightly more
consensual relationship to technology and the body. One that imagined
augmentation and upgrades, not a distributed, atemporal body that we
could not trace, which existed at speeds faster than us that we would
never be able to catch up with, floating above us as spectres made of
dust, plastic and wires. In making a journey with the body we can
immediately perceive, with the explicit understanding of its
edgelessness, and get a sense of the other bodies that exist, the other
systems that arise, and the other realities that can be resurrected.</p>
<p class="gmail-p5"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><strong>References</strong></p>
<p class="gmail-p3">Burrington, I. (2016). <span class="gmail-s3">‘</span>Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country<span class="gmail-s3">’, </span><em>The Atlantic</em>, 8 January. Available at: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/"><span class="gmail-s2">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/</span></a><span class="gmail-s4">.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3">Diane Goes For You: <a href="http://dianegoesforyou.com/"><span class="gmail-s2">dianegoesforyou.com</span></a><span class="gmail-s4">.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3">Hildyard, D. (2018). <em>The Second Body</em>. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.</p>
<p class="gmail-p3">Hong, S. (2015). <em>Presence, or the sense of being-there and being-with in the new media society</em>. University of Illinois: First Monday. Available at: <a href="https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i10.5932"><span class="gmail-s2">https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i10.5932</span></a><span class="gmail-s4">.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3">Solnit, R. (2005). <em>A Field Guide to Getting Lost.</em> New York: Viking Press.</p><p class="gmail-p3"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p3">* * *<br></p><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><span lang="en"><span title=""><br></span></span></div><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2">Mario Santamaría<br></font><span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></span></span><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2"> </font><font size="2"><a href="http://www.mariosantamaria.net" target="_blank"><span><span></span></span></a></font><span></span><span><font size="2"><span></span></font></span><span></span></span><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2"><span></span>Tourist Guide<br></font><font size="2"><a href="https://t.co/VRcqZjU2D6" rel="nofollow noopener" dir="ltr" title="https://internetour.com/" target="_blank"><span>https://</span><span>internetour.com</span></a><br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2">Internet Yami-Ichi, Internet Black market<br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2"><a href="http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/9782/the-internet-yami-ichi.html" target="_blank">Matadero </a><span><a href="http://www.mataderomadrid.org/ficha/9782/the-internet-yami-ichi.html" target="_blank">Madrid</a> &</span> <a href="https://theinfluencers.org/en/yami-ichi2" target="_blank">CCCB</a><br></font></span></div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2"><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></font><span><font size="2"><span><font size="2"><span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></span></font></span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span><font size="2"><span><span><font size="2"><span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></span></font></span></span></font></span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span></span></font></span></span><font size="2"><br></font><font size="2"><span><font size="2"><font size="2"><a href="http://www.mariosantamaria.net" target="_blank">www.mariosantamaria.net</a><br></font></font></span></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span></span></font></span></span><br><font size="2"><span></span></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2">Studio: Trama 34. L'Hospitalet, Barcelona<br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2">e: <a href="mailto:info@mariosantamaria.net" target="_blank">info@mariosantamaria.net</a> tw: @m_msanta<br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2">m: +0034 651 109 724 <a href="https://www.instagram.com/m_msantamaria/" target="_blank">Instagram</a><br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2"><span><font size="2"><span><span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></span><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font><span><font size="2"><span>-------</span></font></span></span></span></span></font></span></font></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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