Artangel today unveils Red Lines by pioneering new media artist Evan Roth, the winning work of its international Open Call. The new work can be experienced for free by anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world.
Evan Roth, Red Lines (2018). An Artangel commission?Credit: Photograph: Abi Berry
Red Lines is a network of infrared video landscapes that can be streamed to a dedicated smartphone, tablet, or computer for free. Roth’s mesmerising infrared landscapes map a hidden source of power. The title refers to The All Red Line, the submarine telegraph cable system linking territories of the British Empire inaugurated in 1910. Many of today’s vast intercontinental fibre-opticcables –- the vital arteries of the digital world – land in the same places where telegraph cables once emerged from the ocean.
Still from a network located video of a fibreoptic cable landing location in Yzerfontein, South Africa made using a camera adapted to film in the infrared spectrum. Detail from Evan Roth, Red Lines (2018). An Artangel commission.
Over the past three years, Roth has filmed these coastal sites from Australia and Argentina to South Africa, the United States and Hong Kong. The videos allude to the sublime, to landscape paintings that evoke human fragility before the power of nature. What threatens to overwhelm humankind now is no longer visible, it is embedded within the landscape of the internet.
Evan Roth is an American artist currently based in Berlin. An early adopter of internet technologies, he was a self-taught coder and net artist before attending Parsons School of Design in New York. He then went on to found the artist and technologist collective Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab in 2007.
Red Lines was selected from over 500 proposals to Artangel Everywhere by a panel comprising artist and writer James Bridle, technology journalist Jemima Kiss, Artangel Co-Directors James Lingwood and Michael Morris, and Artangel’s Head of Digital Charmian Griffin. The work will be available until 10 September 2019.
Connect to Red Lines here: http://www.redlines.network/
Audiences are encouraged to dedicate a screen and space to Red Lines, and to live with it over a period of days, weeks or months. Audiences are invited to share images of Red Lines in their homes and workplaces online using the hashtag #redlines.
About The Artist
Roth’s work has been exhibited at Tate and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the 2016 Sydney Biennale, and Mona Bismarck American Center in Paris. His work is in MoMA New York’s permanent collection. In 2012, he was awarded the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian’s National Design Award, and in 2016 the Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award. http://www.evan-roth.com/
