Category: Projects /

HD video / single channel / 16:9 / 21:01 mins

A collaborative interdisciplinary project between Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano and Bruno Alves de Almeida, which explores the forms of life and the flows of energy that thrive on the deepest corners of the ocean floor, and their influence on our social and environmental identities on the planet’s terrestrial surface. Through a poetic and speculative narrative between two subjects, the video proposes a performative lecture that reflects on the profound impact that humanity has on the deep-sea and how it, in turn, affects human life on the terrestrial surface. Through a discussion on digital technologies, biological and technical membranes, colonial logics of extraction, cognitive processes at sea, and the categorization of oceanic and social layers, the dialogue submerges the audience towards the seabed, as both a material and a symbolic space of human and more-than-human communion.

HD video / single channel / 9:16 / 107:00 mins

Information capitalism relies on the extraction of material goods and digital information through transoceanic infrastructures such as container ships and submarine cables. Counterflow shows the submarine cable topology and the movement of container ships at the seven landing sites of Atlantis-2, the only fiber optic cable that connects Europe and South America, and which follows one of the maritime routes created by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the sixteenth century. Data gathered from Kiln’s shipmap and TeleGeography’s submarine cable map.

HD video / single channel / 16:9 / 19:09 mins

“The blue dot” is a video essay that departs from the Internet Archive in San Francisco to speculate on the ecological and epistemological networks woven around the internet. The blue dot represents a real time sign of users’ interaction with digital servers, but it also becomes a visual and material metaphor for planet Earth, the world’s oceans, and the internet as a watery technology. The video-essay uses original and appropriated material to weave a critical and non-linear story between the internet archive, the ocean, silicon valley, the library of Alexandria, and astrological imagery in order to address the poetic and material entanglement between technology, water cycles, and the production of knowledge as planetary networks.

Special thanks to Michelle Krasowski, former librarian of the Internet Archive, for her collaboration with the narration of this film; to Rodrigo Pacheco for creating the original music; and to Carlos Gómez for the sound mix.

This underwater soundscape was recorded under the waters of the Limfjord in Aalborg, Denmark, during the cold days of February. With the help of a small hydrophone, composed of a piezoelectric system, I set out to conduct deep listening sessions with the intention of getting in sync with the sonic memory of the water in this particular place. On the other side of where I sat listening to the Fjord is Lindholm Høje, a pre-Christian Viking cemetery composed of graves identified by drawings made with stones in the shape of boats. Listening to the deep time of the stones underwater, beaten by the gentle current of the Fjord, I contemplate the relationship between historical memory and geological memory.

A multimedia narrative that speculates about a fictional future where Planet Earth is entirely flooded by a vast Ocean. Navigate through an open ocean of codes and stories, clicking between different options on each page to choose your own path and listen to the future when you arrive to the lighthouse.

Project developed by: Julia Bande, Czarina Calinawagan, Noé Cuéllar, Suhun Lee and Juan Pablo Pacheco.

Website developed by: Facundo Hidalgo.

Enter Wet Analogies

HD video / single channel loop / 16:9

As we see one of the first virtual renderings of water in front of a series of HD videos of the ocean, the sound of the ocean waves fades in and out from white noise, which contains all sound frequencies at the same intensity. The connections between water cycles and digital cycles lie at the core of  what a digital ecology—or an ecology of the digital—could look like.  This work opens the door to thinking about the origins of contemporary mediated images and sounds, borrowing a phrase attributed to the pre-socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus, who argued that water was the origin of life and knowledge.

HD video / single channel / 16:9 / 14:06 mins.

This is a work of speculative fiction around the concept of “liquid democracy” (or participatory digital democracy), a hybrid political arrangement where people can vote without delegating all decisions to a single representative in electoral cycles. The script performs a satirical appropriation of the described benefits of this new political platform and democratic model, as well as of other technological services such as Google’s “My Line”, the e-census, and cloud-bursting. The dialogues are composed by a compilation of infomercials and critical texts read from a TV studio, which examine the imaginaries of a hyperconnected world inhabited by users instead of citizens, and composed of shifting ecologies in relation to water. This work unveils the ideology that operates through the apparent intangibility of digital technologies, which masks their deep relations to material territories, bodies, and flows of information.

Read the script. 

This work was initially presented as an installation and activated through a live performance.
Catalogue of the exhibition “Debes seguir. No puedo seguir. Seguiré” written by Alejandra Sarria. 

This project explores the linguistic connections between the digital and the natural world, using words that have significance in both spaces. This encyclopedia is constructed as a series of hyperlinks between these definitions, usually related to water (as a medium, an object, a metaphor). It also includes a set of GIFs of different states of water as illustrations. The encyclopedia never ends; its possible readings are all interlinked, infinite, and interconnected. The encyclopedia was originally shown at Nuevos Nombres (2018) at the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU) in Bogotá, and could only be accessed by being physically present around a wi-fi router connected to a local server, hosting the encyclopedia. A digital yet very physical experience of the concepts that allow us to define our virtual, yet incredibly material contemporary realities.