Loosely based on TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map, a Netherlands artist, Jeroen van Loon, created an art installation that depicts Internet data as ephemeral and temporary.
The work, entitled An Internet (2015), is on display at the Central Museum in The Netherlands as part of an exhibition called Beyond Data. Read the monograph and view a video of the installation below:
An Internet
How would the internet look like if all data were temporary and ephemeral?
An Internet unfolds a vision of such a future internet, with a radically new type of data: smoke.
An Internet converts the 280 internet undersea cable names into (binary) smoke signals.
The names are puffed into the glass network, causing it to fill up, to spill over by which it puffs the data out again. Together the smoke signals create a unique moment without any form of documentation.
An Internet (2015) from Jeroen van Loon on Vimeo.