(Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College, 2025)
Conducting Empire is a research article and an installation-performance investigating the material history of the undersea cable network: the physical ‘backbone’ of the internet. The project explores what lies beneath Google’s marketing strategies for their new transatlantic cables, tracing the genealogy of this infrastructure to 19th-century Britain and the era of so-called abolition. A live activation of a copper sound sculpture exposes the metallic substance of the cable network and its transmission of historical records into the present. By linking claims of technological progress to imperial control, the work reframes the utopian ideal of global connectivity with evidence found in the British National Archives, from the Birmingham copper industry to a mass of colonial correspondences. Conducting Empire removes the network’s insulation to uncover how telecommunications were produced through a violent historical circuit.
Read the Research Paper Here.
Recording Available Here.
