The Tentacles in the Cloud

Although the Internet is the largest infrastructure ever built in human history, it remains largely invisible, difficult to fully perceive. It’s everywhere and nowhere at once—shaping how we access information, what we see, how we communicate, where we go, and what we desire. This seminar asks: what is the Internet, really? What does it consist of, how did it come to be, and how is it changing? 

We begin by exploring its physical infrastructure of the Internet is today—cables, servers, protocols—where this infrastructure emerged from, as well as the ways it is made visible, represented, or hidden. We touch briefly on how it works, but our focus is on how it shapes everyday life. We move through a loosely chronological series of sessions that examine key moments in its development looking at the early days of networked communication—military research, cybernetics, and systems thinking—before exploring how dreams of community, freedom, and decentralisation became tied to these emerging technologies. We look at how the web became commercialised and centralised—with the rise of targeted advertising, data extraction, tracking technologies, and platform capitalism—whilst at the same time continuing to promise decentralisation, both in Web 2.0 and Web3. Finally we look at the environmental impact of digital infrastructures and the broader environmental metaphors we use to think about networks—from graphs and clouds to forests and underground rhizomes. 

The seminar encourages a critical and curious approach to the internet—not just as a tool we use, but as a technical, social, political, ideological, and cultural system we live within. Through discussion, reflection, and engagement with a range of historical materials, artworks, and guests, we explore how the internet shapes our everyday lives, global economies, political realities and even emotional and bodily experiences, and how we might begin to better perceive and reimagine its potential in the world.