Latency + Lacerations maps an undersea cable from the data centre to the Pacific Ocean’s shoreline, attending to a body under measurement. Between flesh and data, the work stages an ontological séance that reveals the gap where the body and its data ghost misalign, exposing the infrastructures that mediate technological care and algorithmic surveillance. By tracking the cable’s journey from physical coastlines to invisible networks, the film invites viewers to consider how their own data circulates through these same infrastructures, foregrounding the personal stakes of connectivity and surveillance.

Informed by R.D Laing’s divided self and VALIE EXPORT’s performative occupation of urban space, the film returns to these locations as contested thresholds of pause, interruption, and refusal.

The experimental film essay, Latency + Lacerations, was developed in 2025 as the principal outcome of a research residency investigating digital infrastructure, embodiment, and computational culture. Throughout the residency, the artist conducted extensive fieldwork on the Sunshine Coast, tracing terrestrial submarine fibre-optic cable landings, data centres, and telecommunications architectures as critical sites where networked systems intersect with lived experience. Mapping studies, aerial documentation, and sonic recordings provided the foundation for the film’s conceptual and material development.

The project positions chronic illness and disability not only as subject matter but as a methodological framework. The film’s pacing, duration, and visual structure are shaped by embodied temporality, reframing latency as both a technical condition and a critical lens. Rather than illustrating theory, the work emerged directly from site-based research, translating infrastructural inquiry into a cinematic form that examines how digital systems produce legibility, value, and predictive abstraction.

After its 2025 completion, the film has been exhibited internationally at THE CITY LISTENS BACK, PAI_32 / PURIST Gallery, London; Ghosts in the Feedback Loop, UAAD New York; the 7th International Forum of Performance Art (IFPA7), Greece; and ANAT SPECTRA :: Reciprocity – National Symposium of Art + Science + Technology, Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Film Production team:
Videographer: Timothy Birch
Composer and Sound Design: Joseph Burgess
Assistant: Odessa Mahony Dvries
Second Camera Operator: Ryan Jones
Movement Coach: Courtney Scheu
Composer and Sound Design: Finneley Wagner

Research and conceptual development for this film was funded by the R|Artist Residency: Urban Ecologies, presented by SCCA through The Refinery in partnership with the Creative Ecologies Research Cluster at UniSC, Queensland Australia.