A series of pieces on and about the internet. Produced in 2010, yet to be premiered.

This project explores the bilocated quality of the Internet: the imaginary space, ubiquitous and instantaneous, and the physical counterpart needed for that imagination to exist, which spreads out a hyperbolic length of cabling, electricity consumption and machines. By visiting a website and submitting your email address, a system traces back the physical path taken by the message that connects the locations in the real world between the visitor and the website’s host, algoritmically generating in real time a series of postcards composed with images, local weather information, news and facts about each of the cities encountered along that path, sending them back to the user. As an afterthought, each postcard also features a “Post Scriptum” taken from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, which works as a poetic comment, triggering often times uncanny relations between all the elements within it.

The speed at which information travels through the internet creates the illusion of space and time being abolished: if any point is equidistant from infinity and the infinitesimal, there’s not really a where; if past and future are irrelevant due to instantaneity, there’s not really a when. On the other hand, the physical reality suggests a unidimensional space, a linear itinerary, a line drawn between the sender and the receiver. The project exposes that line and speculates on the implications entailed in our different understandings of that space.

A journey from the idea of the Internet as a fearful sphere, whose center is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere, to the Internet as an uni-dimensional space, as a line between you and me.

[ + INFO ] The Fearful Sphere repository website

[ + INFO ] PARTICIPATE in the The Fearful Sphere project! (Beta version) u and me.