one pic tuesday. Trevor Paglen

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Bahamas Internet Cable System (BICS-1) NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean, 2015
C-print, 60 x 48″

The picture above by TREVOR PAGLEN entitled Bahamas Internet Cable System (BICS-1) NSA/GCHQ-Tapped Undersea Cable Atlantic Ocean is part of his solo exhibition that is currently presented at Metro Pictures in Chelsea.

The intensely colorful photograph depicts a fiber-optic cable strangled by algae running on the ocean floor somewhere near the Bahamas like its title states. For this series of underwater images, PAGLEN learned, according to the press release ‘scuba diving and underwater navigation in order to venture to the ocean floor to photograph undersea cables that top secret documents show are tapped by the NSA’. The result is both seducing thanks to the formal aesthetic of the images and absurd knowing that it reveals the physical material of networks which appears to be rather rudimentary.

In the decades since the first transatlantic fibre-optic telephone line was laid, in 1988, such cables have multiplied and spread as bandwidth demands have grown. There are currently three hundred and forty-three of them already active or under construction, and they run more than half a million miles, traversing every ocean and connecting every continent except Antarctica, running up and down the coasts of Africa, through the Hawaiian Islands, and up into Alaska and Greenland. It can be hard to imagine—the Internet itself passing just below the waves of that surf break in California, through the rocks of a craggy coastline in England, over the aquamarine-tinged reefs of southern Florida, under your towel at a beach on Long Island. What is even harder to reckon with is the fact that this growing and critical network, as EDWARD SNOWDEN proved, is perhaps the most powerful surveillance tool in the world. – TIM SOHN for the New Yorker, Trevor Paglen plumbs the Internet, September 22 2015

➝ the solo exhibition by TREVOR PAGLEN is on view at Metro Pictures in Chelsea until October 24, 2015

 



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