harles Lim, silent clap of the status quo, 2016 three-channel digital video, 120 mins. Installation view (2016) at Carriageworks for the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy the artist. Created for the 20th Biennale of Sydney. Photograph: Leila Joy
This 3 channel video work of internet cables under the sea reminds me of Allan Secula's "fish story", the maritime dream in romanticism era compared to the modern era. While Secula's work focus on trading and economics, the industrialised and globalised panorama of the ocean and the ports becomes its opposites, the ocean becoming predictable and static while the ports is always moving and changing. The work by Charles Lim however depicted a ocean that is no longer the free and unpredictable in a different angle, the internet cables that becomes the realised version of Nam June Paik's electronically highway. The definition of ocean and voyages changes again from the romantic maritime.
The idea of the "meat body" in technology is also very interesting, imaging if the cable breaks down during a pandemic, where we heavily rely on them for our isolation, I am surprised that I almost could not imagine how it would be, where the internet age is only 20+ years old but how it becomes part of us .