The Air a Call with You Took
Latex balloon, lashing strap
2020
The Air a Call with You Took is a work that reflects on issues of communication, corporeality and transmission on the overlap of analog and digital geographies. 99% of international data, including internet, private data and telephone traffic, is transported through so-called submarine communication cables; fiber optic cables that entwine the earth and connect the continents with each other. Through this infrastructure the earth appears warped, the shape of its image distorted as digital communication modulates our senses of distance and proximity.
On the one hand, the distorted shape of the round latex ballon – somewhat looking like a cloud – points to this spatial transformation. On the other hand, the title suggests the air inside the ballon to be a trace of a call I had with someone. If I call someone, I send a vibrational trace of my body through the mentioned infrastructure. The Air a Call with You Took presents the original material carrier of that trace, the air escaping my body, as something contained, packaged, secured through the strap and thus ready to be shipped to follow the path of its digitized variant.