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Surfacing

Interactive documentary collaboration with scholar Nicole Starosielski exploring the world’s undersea cable networks.

Year 2015
Format
Website
Credits by Nicole Starosielski, Erik Loyer, and Shane Brennan
Design and programming by Erik Loyer

Image from Surfacing

A companion to Nicole Starosielski’s book The Undersea Network, and powered by Scalar, Surfacing makes the underwater rhizome connections we depend on for our everyday data needs navigable by geography and theme. The work subverts typical mapping interfaces by placing the user in a continuous chain of views which can be zoomed in and out to reveal new dimensions in the content.

The piece begins by dropping the user at a random cable station in the Pacific.
From there, users, can zoom out to reveal a draggable map of underwater cable networks…
…or even further, to a map of thematic connections between stations which can be expanded and read.