Andy Sewell, Known and Strange Things Pass, 2020

The photographs in the book are taken on either side of the Atlantic in places where the Internet is concentrated. Where the fibres come together, and almost everything we do online passes down a few impossibly narrow tubes, stretching along the seabed, connecting one continent to another.

Looking at these vast unknowable entities – the ocean and the Internet – we sense their strangeness.  We can understand each conceptually but can only ever see or bump into small bits of them.  They challenge our everyday assumptions and show us that the boundaries we put between things are more permeable than we might like to think.  That the objects surrounding us daily, appearing so reliable and mundane, are actually parts of much larger, more complex, bodies extended across space and time.

The work is structured through the push and pull of intermeshing sequences.  Things, in different spatial and temporal phases, intertwine and coexist.  As we look closer, worlds we think of as separate bleed into each other – the near and the distant, the ocean and the internet, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as natural with the cultural and technological.