This series of photographs tracks digital signals across nine nodes of our fiber-optic undersea cable network – a system responsible for carrying 99% of all transoceanic internet traffic. The images document cable landings in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, sites where submarine systems come aground and become entangled in the existing movements of both humans and nonhumans. Rather than locating us in an urban landscape, “Signal Tracks” hones in on the cable system’s rural and aquatic environments, extending from breaking waves over Sydney’s beaches, to mountains where brush fires scour O‘ahu’s west shore, to the habitats of endangered mountain beavers in northern California. Although on the surface these images appear absent of industrial infrastructure, the accompanying textual annotations highlight how such “natural” ecologies have been folded into contemporary digital systems.
Articles by Nicole Starosielski
\Nicole Starosielski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the global distribution of digital media, and the relationships between technology, society, and the aquatic environment. Her first book, The Undersea Network (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2015), charts the cultural and environmental dimensions of transoceanic cables, beginning with the nineteenth century telegraph network and extending to the fiber-optic systems that support international internet traffic.\