HYPERTHREAD
Networks Gallery • 21 Sep 2024 - 02 Mar 2025
Included with museum entryHYPERTHREAD explores the hidden infrastructure that makes our digital connections feel seamless.
It seems impossible to comprehend that a key press from your keyboard sends a signal that travels through the sea, into space and back down again to the smartphone in the pocket of your friend, colleague, lover, boss, or internet forum nemesis.
In 2006, US Senator Ted Stevens used the term 'a series of tubes' to describe the internet when opposing network neutrality (the idea that internet service providers should not charge companies for faster speeds).
This term was ridiculed as an outdated and incorrect metaphor for the internet.
'Red thread of fate' is a belief from Chinese mythology that two destined lovers are forever connected by a red thread that runs from the finger of one to another. This explanation of love is about as apt as describing the internet as 'a series of tubes.'
As the internet serves as a conduit through which almost any message can be sent, HYPERTHREAD tells the story of these messages sent and received. Whether we think of the internet as a series of tubes or as a network of red threads that connect us all.
Rel Pham
Rel Pham
Rel Pham is an artist based in Melbourne/Naarm.
Focusing on video and installation work in recent years; Pham's work explores the space between physical and digital realities. Particularly with how culture develops through digital spaces as they contradict traditional border lines, standards, laws and customs.
With our personal tethers to the digital as strong as they have ever been, Pham continues to explore how that affects our philosophies and personalities. Those physical and spiritual costs of a world further venturing into digital spaces.
Whether that is the monolithic buildings that hold datacenter; a terrible droning that scores the glittering LEDs of thousands and thousands of network switches, titantic cables spanning across the globe linking continents, the halos of satellites floating in the heavens.
Pham has exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now with major installation work 'TEMPLE' in 2023, 4A Gallery Sydney with installation work 'CACHE' and has been featured in publications including: The Guardian, ABC 'Art Works' and The Beat Magazine.
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