“Known and Strange Things Pass is about the deep and complex entanglement of technology with contemporary life. It’s about the immediacy of touch and the commonplace miracle of action at a distance; the porosity of the boundaries that hold things apart, and the fragility of the bonds that lock them together.“

– Eugenie Shinkle, 1000 Words Magazine

The transatlantic communications link between Great Britain and North America, the thin fiber optic lines of the deep-sea cable through which most of our daily data communication flows, and the places where these cables make landfall on both sides of the Atlantic, become threads in a web of analogies in the new work of British photographer Andy Sewell. “Looking at these vast unknowable entities – the ocean and the internet – we sense their strangeness. We can understand each conceptually but can only ever see or bump into small bits of them.”

The series combines technology studies and landscape images taken along the English and American coasts, it is edited in repetitive sequences and becomes an analogy of our modern life: “Things in different spatial or temporal phases intertwine and coexist. Worlds we think of as separate bleed into each other – the near and the distant, the ocean and the internet, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as the natural with the cultural and the technological.”

Andy Sewell continues in saying: “Many of the problems we face now seem linked to ways of describing the world that insists on rigid boundaries and fixed identities. The work explores the entanglement we find if we look beyond these assumptions and go in search of connection, in search of lines that communicate between here and there, between surface and the deep.”

Known and Strange Things Pass

Take 3D Tour