"The Internet is one of humanity's most important creations."
The connections are how each network connects concerning its logical relationship with other networks. For example, your computer connects to your Wi-Fi, your Wi-Fi connects to your ISP, and your ISP carries your data to a peering location when handed off to another network. Each one of those dots is connected and represented in the video.
When watching the video, it's important to remember someone out there is plugging these things in, building undersea cables, configuring routers, configuring servers, and working hard to make it all function.
This video takes you through a journey of incredible engineering and tells the story of the effort that all the people on earth have put forward to build and maintain such a fantastic interconnected data-sharing system.
－－Barrett Lyon
Imagery Association of the Key Visual―The Internet 1997–2022
Barrett Lyon‘s The Opte Project, a video documenting the evolution of the internet between 1997 and 2022, provides a quick visual impression of the Internet and the Network, illustrating the vast universe of the Internet and its constant rapid development. The video’s shimmering colours and interwoven threads of spiderwebs, entangled in a dense and delicate manner that resembles the ties of affection, seem to have come to life. This process of scientific and technical visualisation reveals the intricacies of the internet and its inextricable entanglement. This video also seems to echo the exhibition's reflections on technology and sentient beings and is one of the references for the Biennial’s key vision. As the artist updates the video to 2022, we are honoured to premiere this latest version of the video in this year’s Biennial.
The Internet 1997 - 2022
As the Internet is a network of networks, Barrett Lyon has leveraged the connections among all those networks to create a map of the Internet. The project is truly interesting to picture the immense size of the Internet and its constant evolution. This video takes you through a journey of incredible engineering. Starting from the first routing table captures (provided by the University of Oregon’s RouteViews project) in 1997, we walk through the first Internet’s astonishing growth to 2022.” Barrett Lyon “materializes,” in 2 minutes 25 seconds, how the Internet has evolved during the last decades. It does so by showing how networks are connected among them. Each Regional Internet Register (RIR) has been assigned a color:
- White represents the backbones
- Green represents the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC)
- Blue represents the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)
- Red represents the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC)
- Yellow represents the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC)
- Pink represents the Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Center (LACNIC).
- Brown represents the US Military
On the lower left corner, the name of the dominant networks is updated according to mergers, acquisitions and brand changes.
The Opte Project Website：www.opte.org