Writing on Red Lines
...your connection to the land you walk on helps shape your very identity. You are who you are because of who came before you; the earth and waters that supported them, now support you. — Janina Matthewson
Read reflections on Red Lines from users around the world.
Network Located Videos
Like a pilgrim of the internet, Evan Roth has travelled all over the world to record the landscapes where cables emerge from the sea
It was in this area that I first encountered the feeling of being alone and geographically isolated while simultaneously being so close physically to the network. — Evan Roth on describing his first trip to a network cable landing location in Cornwall, UK
Roth was inspired to visit cable landing points across the world after witnessing the transformation of the internet from a place populated by personal websites, forums, and message boards into a centralised system dominated by Facebook, Google, and Amazon. His visits were characterised by a twin sense of loss (of a DIY ethos and decentralised community) and desire to search (for optimism, wonder, possibility, and empowerment.)
Red Lines is comprised of 70 individual network located videos, filmed in ten countries on six continents, with durations between three minutes 26 seconds and 19 minutes 48 seconds, totalling over 17 hours altogether. All but one depicts a landscape where the cables that form our intercontinental connections emerge from the sea.
In Argentina, horses drink languidly at the water’s edge; in France, branches sway in the breeze; in South Africa, birds fly briefly across the screen. Other than small flashes of action, the works are notable for their stillness. In opposition to the pace of the modern internet where immediacy (5Mbs downloads), brevity (280 characters), and connectedness (14k followers) are the currency, the work intentionally moves at the speed of nature, making space for slowness, contemplation, and detail.
Quote: excerpt from an interview with Roth by Bani Brusadin, Ruth McCullough, and Domenico Quaranta for the catalogue The Black Chamber: surveillance, paranoia, invisibility & the internet.
Network Map
On visiting redlines.network, a live map shows the location of your current connection – where you are – the location of the server where the currently streaming network located video was filmed and is also stored, as well as other people on the network with whom you are sharing an experience as well as literally sharing data.
The red lines between all these nodes represent the non-social peer-to-peer network that enables this work to exist.
The title also refers to The All Red Line, the submarine telegraph cable system linking territories of the British Empire inaugurated in 1910. Many of today’s vast intercontinental fibre-optic cables – the vital arteries of the digital world – land in the same places where telegraph cables once emerged from the ocean.
Evan Roth
Evan Roth was selected as part of the 2017 Artangel Everywhere open call for proposals to produce a major project that can be experienced anywhere in the world.
Based in Berlin, Roth's practice visualizes and archives typically unseen aspects of rapidly changing communication technologies. Through a range of media from sculpture to websites, the work addresses the personal and cultural effects surrounding these changes and the role of individual agency within the media landscape.
Roth is the co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab and the Free Art & Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) and his work has been exhibited at the Tate and Whitechapel Gallery and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art NYC.
Images: Evan Roth (left) setting up for an event; (above) outside Viaduct Showroom. Both photographs: Matthew Andrews
Roth’s ideas for the work stem from the decentralised peer-to-peer networks that brought illicitly obtained, pirated culture to many a bedroom-bound teenager in the early 2000s. – Lucy Watson, Financial Times
Roth’s ideas for the work stem from the decentralised peer-to-peer networks that brought illicitly obtained, pirated culture to many a bedroom-bound teenager in the early 2000s. – Lucy Watson, Financial Times, 28 September 2018.
I’m not looking to document the cables but rather to undertake the process of seeking them out to begin a different understanding of my surroundings. – Evan Roth interviewed by Paul Carter Robinson, Artlyst, 10 September 2018.
Artist: Evan Roth
Web Development: Cosmic.berlin using WebTorrent
Project Website Designed: Manuel Buerger
Artist Studio Assistants: Paul Bille and Monika Dorniak
Produced for Artangel by Charmian Griffin
Credits
Red Lines is commissioned and produced by Artangel. The project is generously supported by Creative Capital.
Artangel is generously supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels, and The Company of Angels.
