A Deer in the Wide Web

In 2019, a deer appeared inside a data centre in the United States. While a company employee filmed it with a mobile phone, the animal wandered, somewhat slowly, through the aisles of racks containing data servers and kilometres of cables. The image of this deer, removed from its natural environment and replaced by a technological landscape, raises many questions about how we define and experience bodies in a hyperconnected context.
Every time we convene for a telematic meeting, our face and voice are compressed and travel divided into data to an IP, a dynamic network protocol used by our Internet provider to avoid possible network failures, ensuring that our interlocutor can see and hear us with the highest possible definition. The path this image takes through the network infrastructure depends on the traffic at that moment, and our provider will avoid bottlenecks by selecting the smoothest path, which is not always the shortest geographically.
Mario Santamaria uses this logic of information flow to subvert it. To do this, he recovers the recording of the deer and presents it to us through the design of his own network, which selects the longest possible path between the original source of the video and the user viewing it. This manipulation of the network causes the data to wander as long as possible through the Internet infrastructure. During this journey, these telematic irregularities materialise, producing a latency, a delay in the flow of images, which reveals the geographical tangle in which the infrastructure of our virtual communications is based.