iz paehr

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    Sticky Networks

    A browser shows a website that is split into 3 thirds horizontally with a header saying: tracing networks across & between. The left part shows a view up into the sky with electric cables, a streetlight, buildings, and the text: manifestations of internet infrastructure. The center shows a lush area with a big building in the background and the text: networked ecologies in the city. The right one shows the inside of a library foyer with the text: echoes of a networked past in the archives. In the texts, some parts of the text are marked as hyperlinks.

    Residency, website artwork and exhibition, BangaloREsidency@The Archives at NCBS, Bengaluru, 2024

    In October and November 2024, I participated in Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan’s BangaloREsidency and worked at The Archives at The National Center for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. During this time, I traced how networked ecologies that intertwine telegraph, internet and ecological structures emerge in the city and held interviews with scholars of internet and empire. What resulted is the website artwork stickynetworks.net that complicates/decompiles stories of technological development as supposedly linear, progressive and frictionless. To activate the research in practice, mushroom cultivist Biplab Mahato and I hosted a public network walk titled Writing Telegrams to Fungi, Sending Bytes across Trees at Cubbon Park to search for and trace networks in the ground, between trees and across buildings. The residency resulted in a final show on NCBS campus.

    Overhead view of the opening of the art exhibition Sticky Networks with Iz, the artist, at a podium set up with equipment. The audience stands in a spacious hall with checkered flooring. People observe attentively. A photo taken during the opening night shows the work Yarn and Wires. The banner is about 1.5m times 0.8 m in dimensions, and has the screenshot of two streets as captured on Google Maps Satellite mode printed across. With red yarn, all cables in the streets are stitched atop. The work is hanging from a concrete bridge in the Southern Laboratories building at the National Center for Biological Sciences Bangalore. Below, plants in pots are positioned around a pathway that one can follow to move underneath and beyond the banner. The darkness in the background is interrupted by the lights of windows. A group of people gather around a table where a person examines a mushroom under a microscope. Others look on with interest, with one person pointing at the mushroom. There are various materials such as spore bags, magnifying glasses and petri dishes on the table. A closeup of a table with a microscope and petri dishes with spores and a spore bag.

    Photos: Ravi Kumar Boyapati

    Works

    Sticky Networks Website

    A browser shows a website that is split into 3 thirds horizontally with a header saying: tracing networks across & between. The left part shows a view up into the sky with electric cables, a streetlight, buildings, and the text: manifestations of internet infrastructure. The center shows a lush area with a big building in the background and the text: networked ecologies in the city. The right one shows the inside of a library foyer with the text: echoes of a networked past in the archives. In the texts, some parts of the text are marked as hyperlinks.

    This website artwork on networks complicates/decompiles stories of technological development as supposedly linear, progressive and frictionless. Following and reaching back into (her-hir-his)stories of telegraphy as a technology that deepened colonial control, it collects traces, patterns, breaks and continuities in network structures at the archives at NCBS and in the city of Bangalore. Three storylines open up: On internet infrastructure, on networked ecologies and mycelium in collaboration with Biplab Mahato, and on the traces and echoes of telegraphy. The website offers pathways through collected videos, texts, drawings, interviews with scholars of telegraphy and internet activists, and materials from the Archives at NCBS.

    Yarn and Wires

    A closeup shows parts of the work Yarn and Wires. The work consists of a canvas with a print of two streets captured through the Satellite view mode of Google Maps with all internet and electricity cables visible in these streets stitched atop. The Map view is overlayed with photographs of what the streets look like, showing for example a house, a wall with a tree behind, and a tree photographed from below. The red yarn is stitched across the fabric, coming in and out at different positions, some of them near roofs, trees and electricity poles. The work was photographed while it was moved by the wind, and the lower edge is captured while it is wavy.

    The installation Yarn and Wires consists of a 150x80cm fabric onto which two pixelated streets captured through the satellite view mode of Google Maps are printed. Breaking this perspective of looking down, photos taken from within the streets are angled, positioned and printed atop the map to give evidence of the cables that the satellites do not capture. Red lines criss cross atop this collage: all cables perceived when walking these streets are embroidered with red yarn into and through the fabric. Infrastructures seen from below meet and invert infrastructures omitted in the satellite imagery of Google.

    Hot Spot Constellation

    Dark background with six parallel strings running diagonally. Lines are in green, blue, yellow, white, and another blue, intersecting at times. These lines are installed at the ceiling of the exhibition space and represent the length of a hotspot.

    How big is a hotspot? During a participatory performance at Cubbon Park, participants used yarn and moved away from a hotspot until they could not receive its signal any more. This way, the presence and size of a hotspot was mapped into public space. Installed at the exhibition, the yarn is fixed above in the dimensions of a hotspot to make otherwise hidden networks tangible.

    Mycelium Networks with Biplab Mahato

    Biplab and Iz have been searching for networks above and below the soil and zoomed into a world that underpins plant networks: mycelium. Sometimes referred to as the wood wide web – a contested metaphor for its techno-optimistic humanisation – fungi form networks that are called mycelium which transfer nutrients and minerals between plants. At the exhibition, Biplab Mahato presented materials from his practice as a mushroom cultivist: shows mycelium, lichens, fungi and spores.

    During the exhibition opening, a group of people stands around a woman using a microscope at a wooden table where Biplab Mahato introduces visitors to the world of mycelium. Various materials are scattered on the table: Spore bags, Petri dishes, and boxes with fungi samples. The background features tall windows and concrete elements.