David Rueter and Marissa Lee Benedict
Dark Fiber
Dark Fiber, 2015, David Rueter and Marissa Lee Benedict
Tunneling through commercial and industrial fiber-optic networks and traveling in their shadows, Dark Fiber follows the course of a single cable, pushing against conventional representations of networks and logistics. The video’s montage sequences depict movement between systems and scales as seen in vast landscapes, industrial infrastructure, media apparatuses, art venues, domestic spaces, and imagined worlds.
Marissa Lee Benedict, born in Palm Springs, Calif. in 1985, is a sculptor and writer who currently lectures in visual art. Considering subjects that range from the distillation of algal biodiesel to the extraction of a geologic core sample with a set of gardening tools, her work draws on traditions of American land art to investigate the material conditions of our recently networked world. She earned an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. marissaleebenedict.com
David Rueter, born in Ann Arbor, Mich. in 1978, is a visual artist, programmer, and assistant professor in art and technology at the University of Oregon. Employing video, custom electronics, software, cartography, and performance, Rueter’s experiments and interventions confront established technical systems and their philosophical counterparts, opening cracks for radical alternatives and imaginations. Rueter is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA program in Art and Technology Studies. davidrueter.com
This work is part of the Dimensions of Citizenship Transit Screening Lounge, a rest stop under the US Pavilion rotunda that presents citizenship through a lens of movement: migration, transgression, transmission, travel, and mobility.