Artists’ Insights on the Internet – The Brooklyn Rail

Note from the editor:

Summer can feel like a time to have our head in the clouds, and yet our hybrid lives have us in various clouds all the time. Clouds are everywhere in networked computing culture. The ubiquitous symbol seems to emerge from systems design diagrams where it acknowledges the elements excised from the model’s simplification, and yet assorted artworks invite us into the smog of these complex systems. Through photography, documentary film, appropriated images, curious texts, virtual worlds, and even potatoes, the artists that Mia Stern gathers here do the hard work of grounding the all-too-material transnational politics and market machinations of the internet’s so-called information systems.

Clouded Vision: Artists’ Insights on the Internet

Today, the image of the internet is a cloud. It is the representation of the internet in systems diagrams, the metaphor that pervades discussions of tech services like storage and computing, but also a hand-waving gesture to wherever it is that all our pictures, screenshots, documents and emails are floating around in the digital ether. The idea of the internet as a shapeless mass of vapor hovering above the ground creates the illusion of a benign and intangible entity. Since its creation, artists have helped dispel this image by looking through the metaphor to the material and political constituents of the internet. There we observe a malleable practice made of political, strategic, corporate, and interpersonal decisions.

Mario Santamaría’s “Cloudplexity” exemplifies the internet as a national, legal, and administrative system. Realized in 2019, the series collects hundreds of US patents from 1979 to 2018 and highlights the specific diagram that represents the internet. The patents for technologies functioning with, through, or on the internet, reveal society’s increased connectivity and the development of the “Internet of Things.” Browsing Santamaría’s “Cloudplexity” online, or seeing the series as a gallery installation, does not clarify what the internet actually is. Instead, the simple and repetitive black-and-white drawings of a cloudy sky poke fun at our lack of understanding of the ubiquitous network. Through his source material, Santamaría places the internet within a legal administrative framework, suggestive of its imbrication within a broader system.

Before the “cloud” took on the technological meaning it has today, it was already being used in systems design diagrams as shorthand for elements outside the scope of a system’s exploration. Much like the arrow is a legible sign to represent inputs and outputs, the cloud is an established symbol for the artificial boundary at the edge of a system. It tells us there’s something more without getting into the details. “Beware of clouds!” warned Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems. Hidden behind that image are dynamic elements and connections that are worth examining.

Nevertheless, the fixed image of the cloud remained constant, and trickled into our vernacular as a synonym for the internet. Early internet history provides a glimpse of the particles within this cloudy fog. The internet began its global expansion at a time when metaphors hadn’t yet veered towards the abstract and immaterial: the iron curtain was still drawn across Europe, and the “electronic superhighway,”coined by artist Nam June Paik, was only starting to revolutionize communications infrastructure.

A 1998 illustration by Louis Hellman for Ken Friedman’s “Building Cyberspace” shows the internet as an infrastructural metaphor: a growing tower of Babel hints towards a global imperialist megalomaniac impulse, below which is a “For Sale: Websites” sign that invites investors to buy up some virtual property, while the highway that wraps around them and disappears into the infinite limits of space transports emails, junk, and presumably other forms of information. Possible allusions to the 1956 Interstate Highway Act suggest the electronic superhighway doesn’t just promise increased connectivity, but aims to stimulate the national (American)—and global—economy by reshaping the planet.

The singular highway portrayed by Hellman smoothes over the complexity of plugging a network into national servers and communication systems—the exits and tolls, so to speak—but this omission evades the ideological implication of spreading a technology across the globe. Aleksandra Domanović’s short documentary film From yu to me (2013–14) uses the history of the .yu domain name to take a close look at the moment Yugoslavia became connected to the internet between 1987 and 1991 in the crucial context of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia’s own progressive implosion.

From yu to me dives into the various personal, academic, and strategic factors that shaped the Yugoslavian internet. When computer scientist Borka Jerman-Blažič personally registered the .yu domain in 1989, academics from UC Berkeley then helped her connect Yugoslavia to the internet free of charge. But issues of internet connectivity soon escaped the collaborative academic circles to become entwined in international politics. As tensions rose within Yugoslavia, those involved in the project in Belgrade no longer wanted the internet to be organized through the Slovenian research institute IJS and insisted on being connected via the centralized Yugoslav telecommunications network JUPAK instead. Jerman-Blažič obtained the authorization to connect to JUPAK from the Defense Secretary in 1991, just shortly before Slovenia declared its independence and entered into military conflict with Yugoslavia. Matters complexified as Yugoslavia fragmented further and UN sanctions were imposed on Serbia and Montenegro preventing internet access.

In Domanović’s film, we see the internet evolve from a simple academic network, as it is often described in euphoric Western technological progress terms, to a complex mesh of geopolitical interests. As the film zooms in to the particularities of setting up the internet in Yugoslavia, it manages to capture the political dimension of technological development during and beyond the Cold War as shown by the involvement of national defense agencies, the competing models of the European research network “EARN” and the American “BITNET,” and the decision-making role of a supranational institution like the UN. In short, through the technologies and decisions that shaped it, the internet emerged as a vector of Western soft power.

In “Aleksandra Domanović’s Internet Realism,” Michael Connor likens From yu to me’s close look at the people and motives behind the creation of the internet to Allan Sekula’s monumental photographic exploration of the sea-based geographies of capitalist functioning in Fish Story (1988–95). Fish Story is considered one of the most significant photographic projects of the twentieth century, with a long-lasting influence on subsequent photographers and artists working on digital culture. The work dispels the illusion of the seamless acceleration of global trade across the 1990s by examining the slow-paced and labor-intensive material realities of the modern sea shipping industry. The project culminated in a nine-chapter book with 105 photographs documenting what Sekula described as “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capital world.”

Remaining at sea-level, but sticking closer to the internet, the famed science-fiction novelist Neal Stephenson—known for coining the term “metaverse” in 1992—wrote, “Mother Earth Mother Board” for WIRED in 1996 as the 28,000km-long FLAG (Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe, now FLAG Europe Asia [FEA]) undersea fiber optic cable was being laid around the globe. Stephenson traveled to the locations where the cable emerged ashore to document the public and private interests being played out in the construction of the network. “It behooves wired people to know a few things about wires—how they work, where they lie, who owns them, and what sorts of business deals and political machinations bring them into being,” he stated. Despite Stephenson and Sekula’s convincing calls for visibility as a critical medium for understanding, our representations of the internet today remain as blurred as ever. After all, seas always condensate into clouds.

Embarking on an adventure through the internet today might look something like Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon’s Atlas of the Cloud (2021). This photographic journey through the internet, from the phone screen to the watermarked image of the cloud, offers a straightforward but effective criticism of how the internet transmogrified into a marketplace and enabled cultures of overconsumption. Firstly, the work makes visible the processes behind the seemingly immediate action of ordering an item online, from the signal passing through a router, telecom towers, cables, and data centers, to the labor and exploitation systems in place in warehouses, sweatshops, and delivery services. The journey takes us through consumerism and its consequences, through images of hoarders, landfills, garbage islands, and a series of absurd products available to purchase online. It then dives back into the home to explore how technology erodes and reshapes social interactions: we see images of people working from home, Zoom calls, online dating, porn, and cam girls’ bedrooms. At the end of the work, photos of protests against big tech turn into stock photos of protests with blank signs—the ultimate co-optation of social revolt by an exploitative system.

Degoutin and Wagon’s method isn’t documentary like Domanović’s or Sekula’s, but appropriates sixteen to fifty (sometimes more) web images for each plate. The selection dances around the Platonic ideal of what each element should be, as suggested by the search engine-optimized interface of the internet. From a sensory connection to the machine—the screen, the mouse, the voice command device—to the alienation from our environment with images of nature held captive behind the watermark of the stock photo company, Atlas of the Cloud’s reflexive medium is filled with irony. Though the internet has all the information to remedy our fetishization of technology, it is presented to us in a way that hides its functioning and incites us to consume more. Therefore, in its current disposition, the internet’s primary function is not to communicate information.

Should we gather, then, that the internet’s main purpose is to… make money? That seems to be the presumed logic behind the WIRED writers’ composition of a comment by Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI (regarding an accusation of unlawful scraping) followed by the current valuation of the company:

“The questions from WIRED reflect a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the Internet work,” Srinivas said in a statement. Backed by Jeff Bezos’ family office and by Nvidia, among others, Perplexity has said it is worth a billion dollars based on its most recent fundraising round, and The Information reported last month that it was in talks for a new round that would value it at $3 billion.

The absurd cause-to-effect link made in this statement implies that the internet works because it is earning money. It would make more sense to say that Perplexity is working, as a business, because it is earning money. But if the individual elements that make up the internet are owned by companies—and largely, they are—then is Srinivas technically correct?

Degoutin and Wagon’s Atlas of the Cloud reveals the logic of consumption that is tightly bound within the internet’s structural privatization. Telecommunication companies, technology corporations, and real estate investors are amongst the biggest owners of internet infrastructure. In 2022, the EU’s Digital Services Act was enacted to protect the consumers of the internal market from illegal content and disinformation online. That such acts should be necessary (when they are even instituted and enforced) makes glaringly evident how the internet defaults into a marketplace rather than an information platform.

The current AI context isn’t far from the early internet development depicted in From yu to me with national defense organizations—spearheaded by those of the USA and China— competitively investing in developing technologies. The AI race promises its winner “economic advantage, the entrenchment of their values and norms, and an edge in military power,” as noted by Alex Krasodomski in his introduction to “Artificial intelligence and the challenge for global governance”. Yet the rapid rise of AI is already increasing demand for data centers at enormous energy costs. Without giving an overview of all the pros and cons of AI and the contemporary internet, it’s worth insisting that we look through the cloud—or smog—to better understand these technologies not as individual entities but as an ecosystem made up of intersecting interests.

Can we imagine an internet outside of these parameters?

The global, disembodied, anonymous, “immaterial” cloud held a lot of potential to distance itself from the inequalities of the so-called “real world.” From 2007 to 2009 in particular, as “meatspace” was facing the worst financial crisis since the great depression, the internet’s alternative spaces—from blockchain to virtual environments—were thriving with artistic experimentation.

In 2008, for instance, Cao Fei constructed RMB City (2008–11), an essentialized Chinese city built in the virtual world Second Life, complete with parodied monuments, pandas, and mayoral elections every trimester. The work hosted events where global netizens could meet to discuss and reimagine economic and social realities. Since Second Life was generally accessible in China throughout the work’s existence—despite that nation’s strict internet censorship—RMB City provided a true alternative space for criticism and debate.

Though individual environments like Cao Fei’s RMB City can provide alternative spaces of reflection, the overarching structure of Second Life remains in the hands of the US-based developers Linden Lab. The extent of its governance lies in its terms and conditions. By 2007, the software’s popularity rose to unprecedented numbers, prompting companies like Coca-Cola and American Apparel to flock to the virtual world. Political candidates also reached new audiences by installing headquarters in Second Life, none more successfully than the French extreme-right party National Front. When the SLLA (Second Life Liberation Army) was formed to request the ban of companies and far right extremism from the platform, it was unable to install voting rights for users despite its best efforts. If anything, these exercises in metaverse democracy pushed the internet further into our existing paradigm by creating legal precedent and demonstrating that the cloud exists within rather than above systems.

So let’s sink back down to earth. The overwhelming complexity of the internet makes it difficult to apprehend. If we peel back its layers and boil it down to the essentials, we can see how a communications network functions on a small scale and begin to understand how we may reshape it. Caroline Sinders’s The Potato Internet (2022–23) is a slow-paced small-scale social network powered by Raspberry Pi computers and potatoes. Based on volunteer work and feminist protocols, The Potato Internet does not intend to be scalable, but rather encourages us to rethink the entire system of the internet “from hardware to protocols and governance.”

Though potatoes can’t send memes or compete in the technology wars, they ground us in reality. The cloud of the internet only exists when we limit it from our systems understanding. Greater visibility helps us recognize data centers and the people who own them, fiber optic cables and the people who install them, information and the interfaces that let us access it, regulations and the international politics that determine what is made possible. Therefore, artistic representations of the internet steer us away from the abstract image of the cloud, to perceive a broader range of relationships inherent to the systems, and so perhaps to strive for a network that connects and informs rather than one that grows for the sake of growth. In an age of ever-increasing concern around AI generators, to look back at the discourse around clouds—as a way into critiquing the various metaphors we apply to our technologies—can help us ask better questions of this latest transnational current: whom do these systems connect, how do they inform, and why do they grow? It’s all, as Pink Floyd titled their 1972 album, Obscured by Clouds.