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In his book, New Dark Age, artist and writer James Bridle discusses how global warming threatens the servers that house the internet, and the wi-fi signals we depend on to access this network. (4) The web is a major contributor to climate change, eating up monstrous amounts of energy and rare minerals, but also at threat from rising temperatures and sea levels. As the world faces a potential climate catastrophe two terabytes of code from the world’s largest open-source website, GitHub have been saved onto archival film reels and preserved deep in the Nordic permafrost. (5) Likewise, a time capsule deep in the Swiss Alps uses microfilm and even printed paper to ensure we have, “the tools needed to reconstruct highly-valuable data long after the lifeline of supporting technology has disappeared.”(6) Both these projects rely on the physical recording of data outside of the cloud, as if one day the internet may need to be rebuilt from scratch.

In response to all this, I have created a series of faux artifacts which attempt to communicate a future history where the internet no longer exists. These ‘fauxfacts’ imagine describing the internet in a dystopian future to someone who has no concept of online and offline. How would the internet be remembered historically if the network suddenly became defunct and billions of cat videos and memes evaporated into the cloud? Inspired by Greco Roman frescos and ancient tablets I have shifted the gradients, drop shadows and other internet signifiers from my canvas paintings over to plaster. Through mould making and mixing debris into plaster the surfaces are fossilised, damaged and indented with the remnants of intangible grids and miscellaneous fragments. The virtual, image-based world of the internet has been transposed onto these fauxfacts via a combination of analogue techniques (screen printing, airbrushing, hand painting) and Hydrodipping, an industrial process where digital prints are transferred onto objects using water. The online world of images is disrupted as it merges with uneven plaster surfaces, unable to rely on the flat grid of a screen to reproduce its high-resolution form. Each fauxfact operates in limbo between sculpture and image, representing the flatness of our screens from one angle, and the physicality of ‘meatspace’ from another.

Reflecting on the production of this series of works, the role of the internet in a potential climate catastrophe has stuck with me. I began this project from a speculative perspective, inspired by apocalyptic narratives like the Walking Dead franchise, but the internet’s demise now seems more real than a zombie Armageddon. The relationship between the network and climate change feels like a vast terrain on which to expand my practice into the future.