Data travels around the globe at the speed of light through fibre optic cables, yet the digital world remains bound to matter: to tubes and wires, raw materials, energy and labour. Signals travel around the Earth; capital and heat circulate. In their online exhibition “With the Speed of Light”, the artist collective eeefff follows movements that permeate these infrastructures.
On a table set for a meal, a model landscape is created from miniature cooling towers, conveyor towers and pipeline networks, and among the plants and dishes are also fragments of bodies connected to the system via tubes. Digital infrastructure is not only outside of us; it permeates our everyday lives, perceptions and bodies, just as our bodies keep it running. Cameras follow these cycles, changing the scale from a detailed to a panoramic view of the model landscape. Candle wax melts, flows, and solidifies, in motion and at the same time affected by the cycles all around it. This creates an image of the digital infrastructure, which can only function as long as everything stays in motion.
This work was created in the context of the guided tours that eeefff conducted with artists, scientists and activists at Prater Digital earlier this year. The tours explore how digital infrastructures feel on the ground: in Ukraine, where they offer protection and simultaneously pose a threat, or in Kazakhstan and Belarus, where they function as an instrument of state control. They show how fibre optic cables, networks and data streams permeate and change everyday life in these regions.
Even when systems break down, things do not stay still: After acts of war have taken place, fibre optic cables have been found in bird nests – remnants of military technology woven into new objects created by animals. What begins as a tool of violence becomes part of another cycle. The exhibition uses models to show how systems break down, transform, and continue to exist in unexpected forms. Between speculative narrative and documentary perspective, “With the Speed of Light” invites us to follow the movements of the digital infrastructure on which our everyday digital life depends.
