Cloud-Based Default Network

Galleri Mejan, 2022

Imagine a meeting with a group attending in a room, with several individuals joining on preferred video conference service. Perhaps a familiar scene that is, in my experience, always a mess. Someone is not hearable through the microphone. Another person is unable to see the screen. The camera view is limited, and so on. Without the video call, the meeting would be in an analog room. And if everyone was separated and on their computer, the meeting would be in a digital room. But now it exists in both spaces.

The spatiality has expanded and collapsed. I am unsure if it can be defined as a room. It is something much bigger. It can span across the globe. And it is something smaller, as it fits inside a microcomponent in a laptop. The space I interpret as a room is only binary numbers as far as the computer is concerned. The analog- and digital rooms have merged into something new. I wonder what this new spatiality is and if, after the call is ended, it can be separated. Does it linger?

Can an image, once uploaded, be separated from the pixels? Can a unique series of pixels become an image? Can a neural network's concept of nature, longing, and the sublime be separated from its data and the people who created that data? Can this text be separated from the AI that corrected its grammar? I find this hybridity hard to grasp, like quantum physics. I think of Schrödinger’s cat, the cat that is dead and alive simultaneously, and wonder, is it still a cat?

Sample all nature below,

A sample image is to the right.

I'm not a robot ▢