The Network Is a Clearing

Eileen Isagon Skyers

In And yet my mask is powerful, Abbas and Abou‑Rahme draw on a stanza from Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck. In Rich’s poem, a diver descends alone, equipped with flippers, a mask, a “book of myths” and a knife―into the unknown, “not … like Cousteau … but here alone.” The mask, in Rich’s metaphor, becomes a vessel: it enables breath underwater, it converts suffocation into survival. The descent into the wreck is a journey toward what lies beneath the myth: to “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” Abbas and Abou‑Rahme take up this gesture of rupture and re‑entry as method. They appropriate the mask not as an evocation of trauma or victimhood, but as a tool for radical return. The Neolithic masks reproduced via 3D scans and prints become an analog to Rich’s scuba gear: they are permitted to descend into erased villages, to re-inhabit ground long shaped by dispossession. When the young Palestinians appear wearing these masks and walk through the ruins of villages emptied during the 1948 Nakba, they do not enact mourning, but instead, a ritualized form of re‑occupation. They re‑activate a presence long written out of history. The mask hence becomes a medium of transformation, enabling a rupture in colonial time and the re‑sensitization of land. Rich’s poem does more than just frame the work poetically: it grants it a logic of excavation, of submergence and re‑emergence. The diver’s descent and subsequent reappearance coincide with the artist‑group’s process of re‑entering and remapping erased geographies. The goal is not reclamation in the sentimental sense, but reconfiguration—a kind of “counter‑mythology” in which erasure, ruin, and reappearance are part of a larger temporal reorientation, toward possibility, endurance, and living memory.

This is just one entry point into Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas. However, in a sense, there is no arrival here—only movement: through airport terminals and ruins, memory fragments and continuous feedback loops. The idea of “home,” long held as a site of origin, or return, emerges here as a distributed condition, drifting between systems and artifacts, screens and archives. This exhibition proposes a new framework for understanding diaspora through infrastructures, interfaces, and inherited narratives. What surfaces in this grouping of artworks is much like a set of constantly shifting coordinates: partial, mediated, and constantly negotiated. Rather than treat the digital as a neutral zone, the works remind us that it is indeed a contested terrain—shaping how we connect, how we remember, and who we become.

Zainab Aliyu’s google my memories extends this inquiry into the terrain of computational memory, asking how technology both encodes and reshapes the conditions of recall. Where Abbas and Abou-Rahme revisit physical sites of erasure, Aliyu navigates digital traces, scoping aerial views on Google Maps in an attempt to reassemble a sense of place. Footage from Bonny Island (where the artist traces her own familial and cultural roots) is layered with poetic fragments: “the trees from these google maps images are, in all likelihood, the same trees that bloomed there when i lived on this island.” The installation transforms the gallery setting into a helipad, echoing the drone-like perspective of the camera and the low hum of a copter herd throughout the video. In this immersive staging, Aliyu measures the distance between the emotional texture of memory and the extractive, impersonal logic of the platforms that claim to preserve it.

Philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton has likened the contemporary city to an airport: at once a security environment, a logistical node, and a dense array of information systems. “Generic cities, modeled on airports,” he writes, “…translate less and less between increasingly homogeneous places,” instead producing “interlocking networks of passage” designed to sustain our rhythms of consumption. In Now you tell me. Like always…, Rindon Johnson meditates on this slippage between circulation and dislocation. Five live-streamed airport runways form a composite portrait of mobility without agency. Johnson’s installation feels like an infrastructural inverse of Abbas and Abou‑Rahme’s clearing: here, too, the viewer stands at a site of continuous circulation. But instead of possibility, there is stasis. Planes depart; destinations blur; global networks churn—but the spectator is rendered immobile. The airport, like the server, is a site of high traffic and low agency, organized around legibility, control, and delay. To be diasporic, in this context, is not simply to move, but to be moved by and through systems that precede you. Johnson grounds this global condition in a local context: site-specific research into Nebraska’s economic history and present-day conditions informs the fabricated ceramic tiles that accompany the work, produced in Xingrau, China.These transnational materials replicate the flows of capital and labor embedded in the piece, offering a place to witness and contemplate how infrastructures themselves can produce displacement.

The site of displacement shifts from land and infrastructure toward the interior in Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald’s Voice in My Head, which brings the stakes of digital mediation into the terrain of thought. The work replaces a participant’s inner monologue with an AI-generated voice trained to mimic their tone. An earbud listens in on conversations and offers commentary in real time, audibly indistinguishable from the participant’s own voice. Those who choose to participate are accompanied through daily life by this synthetic double—an inner voice that feels familiar, but is no longer entirely their own. McCarthy and McDonald ask what it means to inhabit a voice that is increasingly shaped by external systems. For many diasporic subjects, identity has always existed in this doubled state—translated, edited, negotiated. The piece literalizes a condition that appears elsewhere in the exhibition as metaphor: what happens when the structures that shape our belonging become inseparable from the structures that shape our perception?

Taken together, many of the works in Close to the Clouds ask us to consider what it means to seek orientation in conditions of disorientation—where memory is archived by machines, movement is governed by systems, and selfhood becomes a recursive loop of signal and noise. The network is not a neutral conduit. It is the ground we stand on, a clearing where fragments converge, where presence is rendered, interrupted, rerouted. If the diaspora once implied distance from a homeland, these artists suggest it now also describes the condition of being parsed by platforms, or held within and across infrastructures. The network is a clearing: not a place of arrival, but a space of ongoing negotiation.