Samir Bhowmik’s multi-disciplinary art practice deals with contemporary issues in New Media, Cultural Memory and the Environment. His artistic research at Aalto Media Lab and the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin examines the architectural, infrastructural and energetic entanglements of Cultural Memory. During the week, Samir will experiment with Godzilla as an undersea infrastructure and surveying platform for artistic production. The project will use underwater mapping technologies (such as side-scan sonar) to map the Baltic seabed following the laying route of submarine cables in the Helsinki archipelago. Samir will be mapping the flows and infrastructures that are not visible to public eye. 

“Keeping one’s data in the cloud entails an increasing reliance on undersea cables, and thus users are entangled in geographies that are invisible. Analysing the undersea network as media infrastructures draws our attention to the ways that the seemingly immaterial digital flows are anchored in material coordinates and biological strata. The project is an exploration into these dilemmas.”