writing

From a Vineyard, a School + The Five Elements of Wine (2026)
Two texts published in Calicata Magazine No. 2, Volver a lo vivo, Madrid, 2026. The first, co-written with Paisanaje, documents the living school that has grown…
Subtle Infrastructures (2025)
Written following walks along the Manzanares River in Madrid with artist Marina Monsonís and landscape architect Malú Cayetano, this essay proposes that imaginative contemplation of water…
Los Frentes del Agua (2025)
A fanzine-essay that weaves together the Spanish Civil War's Water Front — where the Republican army defended Madrid's water supply at Paredes de Buitrago. A fanzine-essay…
Scripts from the Dark Depths (2024)
A compilation of three scripts for videoessays — Underworld, Atlantis, and The Blue Dot — each exploring the ocean as a mythological, technological, and ecological space.…
Humid Telepathy (2024)
An essay that brings together research on water ecologies, digital technology, and telepathic practices through the work of Juan Downey, Bárbara Santos, and the author's own.…
Wet Reader (2023)
A reader edited and produced to accompany a three-day wet workshop exploring embodied relations with water through somatic reading, deep listening, swimming, and fabulatory science at…
Not all Seas and Oceans are the Same (2022)
Beginning with a dream of planetary flooding in which human consciousness migrates into submarine cables, this speculative essay meditates on water as an archive of life,…
Ruins Across the Atlantic (2021)
Centered on the Atlantis-2 undersea fibre optic cable — the first to create a direct connection between Europe and South America — this essay traces the…
Cables, Frontiers, Bunkers, and Ruins (2021)
This Master's Thesis develops an interdisciplinary research into the internet's material infrastructure along the Atlantic coast of southern Spain, centered on the Atlantis-2 submarine fibre optic…
Fermenting and Transforming the Present (2021)
Written with laagencia following a month-long open kitchen and fermentation school hosted at Rib in Rotterdam in August 2020, this text reflects on fermentation as a…
Telepathy Without the Internet (2020)
Through a comparative discussion of the work of Roy Ascott and Bárbara Santos — an artist who works with ancestral Amazonian technologies — this essay proposes…
Digital Hunters: Techno-Territories in the Age of Computational Surveillance (2020)
This essay traces the emergence of "digital hunters" as both subjects and objects of power in the age of surveillance capitalism. Through the analysis of two…
Digital Democracy (2019)
An essay on the transition from citizenship to "usership" — the way participation in contemporary society increasingly happens through digital platforms governed by private tech companies…
Digital Archives, Water and Re-signifying Virtual Space (2017)
An essay on the linguistic, metaphorical, and material connections between digital space and water cycles: from the shared etymology of arkhé (water) and archive, to submarine…
Escuela de Garaje vol. Intemperie (2017)
A collectively written publication documenting Escuela de Garaje vol. Intemperie organized by laagencia, which used the rule of remaining outdoors as a method across eight Saturdays…
Time and Space in the Digital World: Critical Views on the Works of Four Colombian Contemporary Artists (2017)
A critical essay on the works of four contemporary Colombian artists — Sebastián Cruz, Ana María Montenegro, Santiago Pinyol, and Mariana Murcia — who examine how…
Digital Intangibility, an Ideology (2017)
An essay on how the apparent intangibility of the digital functions as ideology: it conceals the material conditions of extraction, labor, and pollution that make the…
Decolonial Perspectives on Digital Arts in Africa and Latin America (2017)
An essay on the material and political conditions of digital arts in Africa and Latin America: from mineral extraction and e-waste to the cultural homogenization imposed…
Digital Archives, Informations Storms and the Knowledge Conundrum (2016)
An essay on the contradictions of the Internet Archive and the contemporary obsession with saving everything. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche, it argues that an…
Two Hundred Copies: Authenticity, Value and Property in the Arts (2015)
An essay on how U.S. copyright law defines a work of art through authorship and singularity — no more than 200 copies, signed and numbered —…
Unveiling the Monster: Memory and Film in Post-Dictatorial Spain (2014)
Honors Thesis on how three Spanish films — El Espíritu de la Colmena (Erice, 1973), El Laberinto del Fauno (Del Toro, 2006), and Balada Triste de…

Digital Intangibility, an Ideology, an essay by Juan Pablo Pacheco in Dissolve SF, 2017

An essay on how the apparent intangibility of the digital functions as ideology: it conceals the material conditions of extraction, labor, and pollution that make the information economy possible. From cobalt mining in the Congo to e-waste landfills, the essay traces the invisible production chain behind the devices we use to access supposedly immaterial worlds. Published in Dissolve SF, 2017.