Mario Santamaría’s Emerald Black Latency is a project that explores the representation and material dimension of data circulation on the Internet, as well as the speculative aspect of an object that is real, but impossible to perceive in its entirety. The object in question is the Medusa Submarine Cable System, an 8,700 km fibreoptic telecommunications infrastructure scheduled to go into operation in 2026. Aimed at improving connectivity in the Mediterranean, as well as linking Europe and North Africa, this new network joins a major submarine system that carries 98% of international Internet traffic. Santamaría’s speculative proposal includes a series of images taken from an intervention by the artist on Google Maps: a simulation of the interior of the Medusa cable – more precisely, the segment between the coastline of Sant Adrià del Besòs (Barcelona), where one of the coastal anchor points is located, and the Balearic Sea – which he has recreated in his studio. Like a contemporary Méliès, the illusion generated by the representation of what is inaccessible opens onto this notion of latency, evoked by the project’s title. An ‘emerald black’ latency similar to a green screen onto which we can project, in a way, the multiplied imaginary of the Internet – this ‘screen’ becoming the metaphorical representation of its real vehicle. This also echoes the Aleph of Borgesian mythology, that point where everything coexists simultaneously and instantaneously, and where all the places in the universe can be found, without merging, seen from all angles. The content of a hypothetical Google Maps well ahead of its time. This web-based intervention also suggests a possible crossing inside the cable itself, which is humanly impossible given its diameter of less than a millimetre. In this way, Medusa is given back the aura of the myth that gives her name: granddaughter of the union of earth and ocean, she only allows herself to be seen by renouncing life. And paradoxically, what we can’t see gives us a glimpse – through digital technology – of what would otherwise remain inaccessible, latent and invisible.

 

Mario Santamaría – Emerald Black Latency