Total Reflection
Steel rail, epoxy casts with LED inserts, custom electronic mechanism reacting to internet activity in its proximity
2019
Installed at “Tubes”, a part of Print Screen International Festival for Digital Art and Culture at the Israeli Center For Digital Art, Holon. Curator: Lior Zalmanson
Extended Text
Tracing back the history of optical fibers to an experiment that formed some of its basic principles, the fact that the original intention was to create visibility into a phenomenon is intruiging in its relation to the visual. The physicist who found the effect called Total Reflection, Jean-Daniel Colladon, originally created it in order to make visible the physical shape of a water jet flow demonstrated at his lecture table. The work is an attempt at bringing visibility into the physicality of current technologies used for delivering media rich content into the palms of our hands. It is not a warning sign nor a smiling emoji, but a mere reflection. It is a peculiar fact that this media saturated present is enabled by an optical phenomenon which is not only hidden from plain sight, but buried deep underground, in cables laid at the bottom of the ocean, underneath roads and urban landscapes. On top of it sits yet another broad abstraction related to the electromagnetic radio signals enabling wireless communication. Our wireless lives are thus also our lives with that which cannot be seen.
