The Internet and the Ocean

Most of the data transfer between North America and the UK happens via thin, fibre-optic cables running along the ocean floor. These submarine communications cables – and the places where they make landfall on either side of the Atlantic – captured the imagination of British photographer Andy Sewell (b. 1978). His series interweaves technology studies with landscape images captured along the English and American coasts to create an analogy of modern life.

“Looking at these vast unknowable entities – the ocean and the internet – we sense their strangeness. We can understand each conceptually, but can only ever see or bump into small bits of them,” the artist explains, continuing: “Many of the problems we face now seem linked to ways of describing the world that insists on rigid boundaries and fixed identities. The work explores the entanglement we find if we look beyond these assumptions and go in search of connection, in search of lines that communicate between here and there, between the surface and the deep.”

‘Known and Strange Things Pass’ is open at the Robert Morat Gallery in Berlin until October 30, 2021. The exhibition is accompanied by a book of the same title, published by Skinnerboox.

For further information visit Galerie Robert Morat