Title: Cables, bunkers, ruins, and myth: decolonial speculations on the internet’s material infrastructure
Date: 2021-10-18
Category: discussion
Tags: infrastructure, internet, discussion
Slug: cables-bunkers-ruins-myth
lang: en
event_start: 2021-10-18 17:00
event_duration: 2h
featured_image: /images/cables.jpeg
status: draft
summary: Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano will will share his research on the Atlantis-2 submarine cable and its landing site in Conil, a small coastal town in the south of Spain filled with ruins of colonial and information infrastructures.
Juan Pablo will share his research on the Atlantis-2 submarine cable and its landing site in Conil, a small coastal town in the south of Spain filled with ruins of colonial and information infrastructures. Drawing from archives, original interviews, observations, and mythology, he will weave a series of non-linear decolonial speculations around the historical and geopolitical genealogy of the internet’s infrastructure and think about the possible future of the internet as a submarine ruin.
His research aims to bring to the forefront the concealed colonial and material genealogies embedded in submarine cables, highlighting the internet’s materiality as a fragile system that is prone to decay and infrastructural repurposing by human and non-human agents. The second half of the gathering will open a space to collectively reflect on the internet’s contentious production and mediation of reality, proposing a mode of research on media technologies that operates from a relational and networked proximity.
Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano (Bogotá, 1991) is a visual artist and writer. Through texts, videos, web projects, and collaborative labs, his research explores the historical, poetic, and material intersections between the technosphere and the biosphere, telepathic networks, and the entanglement between water and the internet. He lives between Bogotá and many other places, virtual and physical, and is a professor at the Visual Arts Department of the Javeriana University and the Digital Narratives program at the Andes University in Colombia.
