CrimeEye Cameras - Burrington writes: "I've only seen these cameras in lower Manhattan, and pretty much only around federal buildings. They appear to belong to the Department of Homeland Security, and are manufactured by a company named Total Recall Corporation. (Not even joking.)" Ingrid Burrington
CrimeEye Cameras - Burrington writes: "I've only seen these cameras in lower Manhattan, and pretty much only around federal buildings. They appear to belong to the Department of Homeland Security, and are manufactured by a company named Total Recall Corporation. (Not even joking.)"
NYPD Cameras - As part of a program called ARGUS, NYPD has several thousand of these cameras stationed around the city. Ingrid Burrington
NYPD Cameras - As part of a program called ARGUS, NYPD has several thousand of these cameras stationed around the city.
Subway Wi-Fi Devices - These antennae blast signal onto city subway platforms. The system was built in partnership with Transit Wireless, starting in 2007. Ingrid Burrington
Subway Wi-Fi Devices - These antennae blast signal onto city subway platforms. The system was built in partnership with Transit Wireless, starting in 2007.
Distributed Antenna Systems - A DAS is "basically a way to expand a cell network's reach, adding capacity in under-covered areas," often denoted by an orange cable marking heading into a street pole. Ingrid Burrington
Distributed Antenna Systems - A DAS is "basically a way to expand a cell network's reach, adding capacity in under-covered areas," often denoted by an orange cable marking heading into a street pole.
New York City streets are covered with cryptic, colorful markings that signal the infrastructure running below. This one's easy: Cable TV. Ingrid Burrington
New York City streets are covered with cryptic, colorful markings that signal the infrastructure running below. This one's easy: Cable TV.
Level 3 Communications Manhole Cover - According to the guide, this Tier 1 fiber optic network "has a direct connection to every other network online without paying fees to do so." It also received a $400 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2012. Ingrid Burrington
Level 3 Communications Manhole Cover - According to the guide, this Tier 1 fiber optic network "has a direct connection to every other network online without paying fees to do so." It also received a $400 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2012.
The internet is everywhere. In another, more concrete way, it’s inside massive, anonymous buildings and beneath city streets, marked by special manhole covers and cryptic, colorful symbols.
Ingrid Burrington introduces us to this latter face in Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide. The artist/writer/map-maker’s book and accompanying website (or, website and accompanying book) document the many physical manifestations of modern telecommunications in the Big Apple. As infrastructure, it’s massive, messy, and constantly under construction. But as Burrington points out, “the city’s tendency toward flux is a strange blessing for the infrastructure sightseer: markings and remnants of the network are almost everywhere, once you know how to look for them.”
Ingrid Burrington’s new book is a guide to infrastructure in the Big Apple. Ingrid Burrington
The field guide shows just that. It includes an illustrated taxonomy of manholes, including those of Time Warner Cable and Level 3 Communications, a fiber optic provider who signed a near half-billion dollar contract with the Department of Defense in 2012. It decodes the colorful symbols you’ll often find spray-painted on city streets, providing capsule blurbs on the companies they denote. It identifies other random bits of hardware, from the cameras deployed by the MTA to the “Distributed Antenna Systems” used to blanket the city’s urban canyons in cell coverage. And it includes a handy list of infrastructural landmarks, including 60 Hudson, the former Western Union headquarters, where New York City links up to the internet at large. The art deco “carrier hotel,” as they’re called, is currently home to upwards of 70 million feet of cable. (Below: an excellent short documentary on the site, created by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Cholas-Wood.)
With the project, Burrington hopes to familiarize the public with the networks on which society increasingly relies. “It’s sometimes hard to connect what happens on a server in Virginia to what happens on a screen in Manhattan,” she says. “And it’s admittedly a very niche topic. Looking for markings and monuments and hardware seemed like a more accessible approach to getting people excited about network infrastructure.”
Niche though it may be, infrastructural visibility is an increasingly common theme for artists and activists alike. From Trevor Paglen’s long-distance photographs of NSA data centers to Timo Arnall’s meditative server room videos, there’s been a discernible surge in interest in showing people how these vast, often-incomprehensible systems really work. And it is indeed our right to look. A certain recent Oscar-winning documentary reminds us what happens when we don’t.
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