Territorial Glitch
year:
2022
48°33’17.6“N 2°42’46.2“W
Plérin, a quiet and ordinary small coastal town in the North of Brittany, France. There, the tumultuous opalescent Atlantic ocean encounters the rocky shoreline of mainland Europe. Beneath the yellowish sand of the Rosaires beach lies the landing of the FLAG Atlantic-1 (FA-1) internet cable connecting to Island Park, New York, 5'500 kilometers away. Operated by Global Cloud Xchange, the fiber optic heavy duty wire measuring a diameter of 10cm remains completely invisible to its surroundings.
Built as an organized assemblage of hard and soft components extracted around the world – copper, steel, nylon, kevlar, silicon, polyethylene, optical fibers and plastics – the cable is more than a simple technical device. It represents one stream of the invisible infrastructure governing parts of our world as a complex and intertwined network. Acting on ourselves as much as we act on it, this invisible yet physical and vulnerable apparatus remains unconceivable to us for its sheer massivity. Due to security reasons, the appearance of its visible infrastructure and connecting nodes takes shape in consciously generic and unremarkable constructions.
In the deep sea, the cable lies directly on the seabed. Further approaching the coast, it is progressively buried into the sand. At the intersection between land and sea, an anti-monument typology makes the link between these two antagonist worlds: the Landing Station. Rarely operated or inhabited by humans, such small construction mainly plays the role of a node in the grand diagram of the global network. Occasionally subterranean, or disguised as an archetypal building from wherever the station is located, it can also take the shape of an anonymously generic box.
In 2010, WikiLeaks revealed a list of sensitive sites for terrorist attacks according to the United States, Plérin was then listed as one of the potential targets turning the banal town into a geopolitical critical point. Complementing such episodes of a sudden reappearance of the digital into the “real” world, intermittent stories like the accidental dig up of the FLAG Atlantic-1 cable by scallop fishing ships remind us that both physical and digital come hand in hand. They represent a single world of hardware and software that embodies the data we use daily.
In “The climate of history at the planetary age”, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that we, as humans, must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. The globe is an anthropocentric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. In this sense, the infrastructural submarine network, away from the eyes, has been planned and constructed as a global system – a sort of Postnatural Apparatus, covering the planet as a standalone rhizomatic grid. Nevertheless, it cohabits in its existence with multiple elements belonging to the planetary: fishing nets, potential terrorist attacks, encounters with sharks, etc. This investigation wishes to reflect upon this concept of distortion between the desired invisibility of the network and its blatant cohabitation revealed at times as glitches in a territory.
location:
Plérin, Franceteam:
Alice Loumeau, Romain Curnieryear:
2022commissioner:
self-initiated48°33’17.6“N 2°42’46.2“W
Plérin, a quiet and ordinary small coastal town in the North of Brittany, France. There, the tumultuous opalescent Atlantic ocean encounters the rocky shoreline of mainland Europe. Beneath the yellowish sand of the Rosaires beach lies the landing of the FLAG Atlantic-1 (FA-1) internet cable connecting to Island Park, New York, 5'500 kilometers away. Operated by Global Cloud Xchange, the fiber optic heavy duty wire measuring a diameter of 10cm remains completely invisible to its surroundings.
Built as an organized assemblage of hard and soft components extracted around the world – copper, steel, nylon, kevlar, silicon, polyethylene, optical fibers and plastics – the cable is more than a simple technical device. It represents one stream of the invisible infrastructure governing parts of our world as a complex and intertwined network. Acting on ourselves as much as we act on it, this invisible yet physical and vulnerable apparatus remains unconceivable to us for its sheer massivity. Due to security reasons, the appearance of its visible infrastructure and connecting nodes takes shape in consciously generic and unremarkable constructions.
In the deep sea, the cable lies directly on the seabed. Further approaching the coast, it is progressively buried into the sand. At the intersection between land and sea, an anti-monument typology makes the link between these two antagonist worlds: the Landing Station. Rarely operated or inhabited by humans, such small construction mainly plays the role of a node in the grand diagram of the global network. Occasionally subterranean, or disguised as an archetypal building from wherever the station is located, it can also take the shape of an anonymously generic box.
In 2010, WikiLeaks revealed a list of sensitive sites for terrorist attacks according to the United States, Plérin was then listed as one of the potential targets turning the banal town into a geopolitical critical point. Complementing such episodes of a sudden reappearance of the digital into the “real” world, intermittent stories like the accidental dig up of the FLAG Atlantic-1 cable by scallop fishing ships remind us that both physical and digital come hand in hand. They represent a single world of hardware and software that embodies the data we use daily.
In “The climate of history at the planetary age”, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that we, as humans, must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. The globe is an anthropocentric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. In this sense, the infrastructural submarine network, away from the eyes, has been planned and constructed as a global system – a sort of Postnatural Apparatus, covering the planet as a standalone rhizomatic grid. Nevertheless, it cohabits in its existence with multiple elements belonging to the planetary: fishing nets, potential terrorist attacks, encounters with sharks, etc. This investigation wishes to reflect upon this concept of distortion between the desired invisibility of the network and its blatant cohabitation revealed at times as glitches in a territory.
