Tracery *Acetate prints* *99 x 79" each* Hanging in the double windows of the gallery are a grid of acetate prints, each with a web browser window filled with a red-tinted map showing land and water, with transparent lines denoting underwater data cables. Pieced together, they show the entire map of these cables, reaching from coast to coast of every continent around the world, save for Antartica. These undersea fibre-optic cables carry 99% of all digital communications between continents in the form of infrared light. The name Tracery comes from the computational traceroute protocol, used to request information about the path that data takes to get from one server to another. In architecture, the term describes decorative ribs or spaces in window frames that both provide support and creates decorative patterns. Here, light is media, both in the reality of the cables, the traceries in the gallery windows, and the window as a portal for projection. --- # About Tracery Hanging in the double windows of the gallery are a grid of transparencies, each with a web browser window. Each is filled with a red-tinted map showing land and water, with clear lines mechanically drawn between circular connection points denoting underwater data cables. Pieced together, they show the entire map of these cables, reaching from coast to coast of every continent around the world, save for Antartica. Daylight passes through, colouring the interior of the gallery on the 'inside' of the [[Artwork - Fyke Net|Fyke Net]]. [[Artwork - Fyke Net|Fyke Net's]] projected program displays the messages a computer sends and receives from other, outside servers. The name *Tracery* comes from the computational *traceroute* protocol, used to request information about the path that data takes to get from one server to another. Accessing the internet from your home computer often means multiple 'hops' of data packages to first find the server address of the requested content, and then delivering that information. The packets may travel from your home router through your neighbourhood's wires to a local data center, then onwards through fibre-optic cables to an internet exchange point, to a cable receiving station on the coast and then across the ocean through another series of exchange points to reach a server in a data centre. Data packets use whatever route is fastest and available; depending on where the origin and requested server is, they may not go through ocean crossings. *Tracery* has another meaning in architecture, which describes the decorative ribs or spaces in window frames that both provide support and creates decorative patterns, common in Gothic buildings. As Shelby Wilson points out, these divisions "dissect light… while some light continues to its terminal, the rest is captured and rendered as negative space".[^1] This installation looks as light as media, both in the reality of the cables and as traceries in the gallery windows, as well as the window as a portal for projection. ## The computer screen as window to doors Throughout my work I've been interested in creating opportunities to pass through portals – windows, doors, frames – from one space to another. Often this includes digital media as part of the process or product. When I use technology, it's primarily through the computer screen and its interfaces – the monitor turns from an opaque black box to a transparent window looking into a virtual world, that I then interact with. I can capture my environment through photo or video, turning the light captured by a lens into data, displayed as a digital media product in a computer program's window. Byung-Chul Han argues that the computer screen isn't just a window to another space, but a window that communicates with other windows, windows with doors.[^2] The use of 'window' for computer programs is an analogy; they contain a visualisation of what the computer is doing. Just like 'folders', 'files' and 'desktop' are metaphors that hint to the user what kind of features and affordances they have, the window is an interface, a way of making the processes 'below' visible and legible to the user. It's not possible to look at a computer and see what's happening within because we can't see electromagnetic waves. In the same way, you can't really 'see' the internet. The internet is made up of multitudes of computers connected together, geographically distant and in massive quantities. We only ever see a part of the whole through our screens. > Looking at Internet is like looking at a landscape through a window; we see a framed part of the whole view…The frame delimits Internet space and influences its arrangement; Internet architecture depends on this frame. Web windows work as modular frames, fitting in an infinite number of formats. – [[../references/Louise Druhle - Critical Atlas of Internet#^30e80c|Louise Druhle - Critical Atlas of Internet]] Thus, *Tracery* employs the web browser as a frame for its map of the submarine cables – in particular, my personal web browser, which I used to access the Telegeography's map. The artwork's use of the gallery's architecture mirrors the browser window's support of the website's content. These windows are rectangular, often structured (sometimes invisibly) as grids. We could have chosen a different shape for browser windows[^3], but the grid rules as a matrix of knowledge and "one of the basic laws of knowledge – the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the 'real' world."[^4] Then the rectangular frame for our view of the Internet is appropriate, as we view it as a repository of knowledge. ## Data in light Were you to try to 'look directly' at the Internet, you may attempt to look at the physical fibre-optic cables connecting much of this infrastructure, like Tung Hui-Hu did when he worked in a data centre: > So, impulsively, I took a fiber-optic cable and unplugged it. Then I held it up to my eye and looked in. On the other side of the fiber, I imagined, was Japan. The light was red, and it winked like a star on a smoggy night… my naive desire to look into the cloud’s fiber-optic network is a little like asking what a film is about, and looking into the most direct source of the image—the projector beam—to find out.” -[[../references/Tung Hui-Hu - A Prehistory of the Cloud#^7e1745|Tung Hui-Hu - A Prehistory of the Cloud]] Fibre-optic cables work by encoding data in infrared light signals passed through them. Borrowing from [[../references/Evan Roth - Landscapes Series|Evan Roth's Landscape Series]], the red filter in *Tracery* nods to this, while the lines representing data cables are transparent, letting light through them and into the gallery. --- To: [[Index]] - [[Artwork - Fyke Net|Artwork - Fyke Net]] - [[Artwork - Wifi Capture]] - [[Artwork - Currents|Artwork - Currents]] - [[Artwork - Eelektrosluching|Artwork - Eelektrosluching]] --- [^1]: [[../references/Shelby Wilson - What Makes It Through#^73a191|Shelby Wilson - What Makes It Through]] [^2]: [[../references/Byung-Chul Han - In the Swarm - Digital Prospects - 2017#^f59caa|Byung-Chul Han - In the Swarm - Digital Prospects - 2017]] [^3]: These signatories on [The Browser Window Manifesto](https://studio24-24.com/the-browser-manifesto/) would like to expand beyond the rectangular frame [^4]: [[../references/Rosalind E. Krauss - Grids#^28d815|Rosalind E. Krauss - Grids]] --- #translucency #undersea_cable #mapping #data_packets #windows #The_Internet