It all starts with a dream. A given situation, between the vivid, the ethereal and the implausible, arising from desire, pleasure, fear or apprehension registered in the unconscious. The process of dreaming is a form of nocturnal emptying in which the mind selects seemingly random elements from the known, the heard, and other sensory experiences, weaving them into cryptic or brutally obvious narratives. Each dream builds a language of its own, a vocabulary of signs that are organized according to the user's associations, a magmatic force that ceaselessly generates new possibilities of imagination and experience (Berardi, 2021). We feed this machinery with data, with an incessant flow of information that enters and leaves our consciousness, forming networks and patterns, while much of this input disappears without a trace. A constantly changing architecture.

One of the central themes of the exhibition arises from a recurring dream from Simón Medina's childhood: a walk through the forest with her mother leads her to a lake, where a horse lies submerged. As they approach to sate their curiosity, her mother falls into the water and is trapped under the surface. The image of this dream has a magnetic force of contemplation; however, everything that falls into the lake becomes inaccessible, turning into an object of attachment and desire with which one cannot interact, only observe. According to media theorist and artist Alexander Galloway, in a dream, a dream the thing that will be represented most flagrantly is the very thing that will be, in practical terms, the most invisible[1]. In this case, the visible — the submerged horse and the trapped mother — represents the intangible: the attachment and the fear of disconnection. On the other hand, the image of the horse also refers to the story of the horse Hans “the clever”, whose trainer claimed that the animal could solve mathematical operations. In reality, Hans was actually responding to gestures and subtle conditioning derived from his interaction with the trainer. This anecdote is frequently used in media theory as a parallel to artificial intelligence (AI) processes: the system learns, but within the limits imposed by its programming; its “intelligence” ultimately depends on our willingness to believe in it.

In Diving Clouds, the image of the submerged horse also functions as a metaphor for the underwater infrastructure of the Internet, a physical network hidden underwater that sustains the illusory lightness of the “cloud”. The exhibition proposes a change of perspective: if the Internet is a material network, with tangible ecological and economic costs, how can we represent it visually?

Lucía Simón Medina uses the oneiric as a metaphorical tool to address the architecture of the Internet and data transmission. It confronts us with the paradox of a digital world that we perceive as intangible, immaterial, when in reality it is supported by a physical infrastructure deeply anchored to the seabed, interwoven with cables bearing equally vaporous names such as Anjana[2] or Atlantis. Through hand drawing, archival research, sound collection and text analysis, the artist traces a series of visual maps in an effort to give form to the invisible, to mediate between the abstraction of the digital world and the materiality of its hidden architecture. These cartographies also reveal the residues, the scars and the stories that water communicates about the true computational cost.

The current cable network follows the pre-established routes of the telegraph network. This underwater mesh merges the past, present and future from data emissions and their storage. Seen from another point of view, the network of wires is reminiscent of Australian Aboriginal song lines[3]: invisible but sonorous routes laid by the ancestors during Dreamtime[4] across the Austral Territory, which guide those who can sing their song. A transmission of geological, biological and computational temporalities on the ocean floor, where past and present collide in flows of information exchange and storage through a constantly growing map of cables (597 submarine cables to date). A phantasmagoric present built on traces of a continuous past, such as the first transatlantic telegraph message sent in 1866 between U.S. President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria. The echoes of the 98 words emitted in that message took 16 days to be received in their entirety.

As part of these questions, Simón Medina takes four texts as central axes: Computing Machinery & Intelligence (1950) by Alan M. Turing, Are Some Things Unrepresentable? (2011) by Alexander Galloway, The Third Unconscious (2021) by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi and Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021) by Kate Crawford. Each of these texts corresponds to a drawing in which the artist transcribes them by hand, turning them into maps, diagrams and rhizomes, from which three key words are extracted. These drawings make visible analogical learning methodologies that deconstruct and illustrate the input processes used to feed artificial intelligence by establishing ramifications of meanings from keywords. Likewise, the selection of these texts also denotes an x-ray of the different moments and effects of the telecommunications era.

In his essay on the unrepresentable, Alexander Galloway argues that data, in its pure state, lacks visual form. It exists only insofar as it is organized and made visible within a network of information. To understand this, it is worth bringing up the etymologies of these two terms “data” and “information” that Galloway himself mentions in his text. That which we call “data” refers to “that which has been given”: facts, measurements, “raw” records that remain after the tide of being recedes (Galloway, 2011). “Information,” on the other hand, is the act of giving form to that data, of organizing it into a comprehensible - or instrumentalized - narrative by appealing to the plasticity intrinsic in its practice. The latter is reminiscent of media theorist McKenzie Wark's reflection between facts and fiction. Although commonly considered opposites, they have their origin in a basic similarity: a practice. Both are actions that are embedded in the world and whose importance and existence are intrinsically linked. Therefore, it is undeniable that fiction is at the very core of the reproduction of facts, since there is always an interference on the part of the reporter. This agency lies in their shared etymology: (lat.) fingere/fictio: “to give form.” As Wark points out: sometimes we need a fiction to hold facts together[5].

In Computing Machinery & Intelligence, Alan Turing starts from the question of whether machines can think, an approach that is later modified by the ambiguity that defining “thought” or “consciousness” implies. In order to argue this position, Turing introduces the Imitation Game (today known as the Turing Test), a tripartite dynamic in which an interrogator has to discover which of the two characters in the adjoining room is male and which is female, according to a series of questions. The communication between these people is only typed. One of the respondents can give answers that mislead and alter the interrogator's conclusions, while the other can help him/her. This role can be interchanged between the interviewee throughout the interrogation. So Turing wonders what would happen if a machine were to take the place of one of the repliers: would the machine be able to mimic these subtleties of language in order to mislead the interrogator?

Taking into account philosophical and mathematical objections, Turing approaches intelligence as a phenomenon based on interaction, learning systems and adaptation. However, although AI models can currently process language, answer questions and even generate ideas in a contextualized way, their “understanding” is structural and based on patterns, not on subjective experience or consciousness. They remain bounded by programming and the data with which they are “trained”, as Hans' horse analogy suggests.

In The Third Unconscious, Bifo Berardi traces the three different historical moments of the unconscious: the Freudian one that identified a repression of sexual impulses and pleasurable desire in favor of “normality” sustained by the pillars of modern public life “Science, education and industriousness” and of private life “Marriage, monogamy and nuclear family”. This repression gave rise to neurosis. A second moment of this unconscious is transformed by the speed of access and consumption of information. The saturation and accessibility of stimuli liberates desire while overwhelming pleasure. Desire is celebrated as the driver of consumption, competition and economic growth, while pleasure is delayed. Psychosis thus takes the place of neurosis, hand in hand with anxiety, attention disorders and panic. Finally, Berardi outlines the beginnings of the third unconscious: an era marked by chaos, awareness of mortality and finitude, emotional and bodily detachment embodied by COVID driven by over (dis)information. A bio-info-psycho-virus that separates bodies and their emotions, supported by autism and alexithymia as immunizers of human experience.

Finally, Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence exposes the system of extraction and exploitation that underpins artificial intelligence, dismantling its perception as a neutral technology in the collective imagination. A clear example is the mining of materials such as lithium and silicon, fundamental to hardware manufacturing, whose environmental and labor impacts are devastating. Likewise, data infrastructure and servers require enormous amounts of energy and water for their maintenance.

These problems are reflected in Atlas (2025), a 3-meter drawing in which Simón Medina compiles and expands the data mentioned by Crawford on the main technology companies, the most important electronic waste dumps (Ghana, Nigeria, China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Palestine), the twelve largest data centers in the world and the silicon and lithium mines, also showing the main centers of power and exploitation. Through this cartography, the artist also makes visible the internet cabling network, the architectures that house and represent these corporations, as well as the countries with the largest reserves of lithium and silicon, highlighted with graphite.

By superimposing hand drawings and digital collage, the artist translates the complex language of academic texts and media theory into visual representations that reveal the tension between the swift flow of digital technologies, the leisurely temporality of manual gesture and human intellectual processing. The stroke of the drawing becomes an act of resistance against the immediacy of computation, a way of returning human scale to a reality dominated by speed and virtuality.

Ultimately, Diving Clouds confronts us with the contradiction of a digital world that seems intangible but leaves deep traces in the landscape, in the ecology and in our own psyche. The exhibition invites us to immerse ourselves in these seas of information, to decipher the stories submerged in its architecture and to rethink the imaginary of technology from an aesthetic that not only seeks to represent the visible, but also to give form to the concrete ecological and cognitive impacts that lie in the shadows.

So maybe the network visualization itself — even as it flaunts its own highly precise, virtuosic level of detail — proves that there is another story happening behind and beyond the visible. In other words, there are some things that are unrepresentable [6].

Referencias:

1.  Abram, D. (1997b). The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/retreat/files/abram_the_spell_of_the_sensuous_perception.pdf

2.  Berardi, F. (2021). The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age. Verso Books.

3.  Chatwin, B. (1987). The Songlines. Penguin Books.

4.  Crawford, K. (2021). The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.

5.  Galloway, A. (2011). Are some things unrepresentable? Theory Culture & Society, 28(7–8), 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411423038

6.  Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 236, 433–460. https://jupyter.brynmawr.edu/services/public/dblank/CS371%20Cognitive%20Science/2016-Fall/TuringComputing.pdf

7.  RIBOCA. (2020, September 24). McKenzie Wark “Ficting and Facting” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbInv9C1lY0

[1] Galloway, A. (2011). Are some things unrepresentable? Theory Culture & Society, 28(7–8), 95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411423038

[2] The Anjana is a fictional character from Cantabrian mythology, referenced to by the costumbrista Manuel Llano in the first third of the 20th century. They are seen walking through forests and streams. It is said that they converse with the waters that flow from the fountains and springs where they live. They help wounded animals, broken trees, lovers, lost people, the poor and the suffering. If the person is good, they will help him, but if not, they will also punish him. Colaboradores de Wikipedia. (2024, December 15). Anjana. Wikipedia, La Enciclopedia Libre. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anjana

The Anjana cable, owned by META, came into operation in 2024 with 7,121 km connecting Myrtle Beach in South Carolina (United States) with Virgen del Mar, Cantabria.

[3] Abram, D. (1997). Chapter Five: In The Landscape of Language. In The Spell of the Sensuous (p. 101). Vintage Books. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/retreat/files

abram_the_spell_of_the_sensuous_perception.pdf.

[4] Dreamtime is the period in which life was created according to the aboriginal culture by spiritual beings/ancestors. Dreaming is the word used to explain how life came about; it is the stories and beliefs behind creation. Dreaming is not static or linear. It is the past, but it is also the present and the future. The Dreaming is constantly evolving to explain current events and changes.

[5] RIBOCA. (2020, September 24). McKenzie Wark “Ficting and Facting” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbInv9C1lY0

[6] Galloway, A. (2011). Are some things unrepresentable? Theory Culture & Society, 28(7–8), 91. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411423038.