SEVERN SEA (2017) main install view @ Contains Art, Watchet

"Ricocheting through all hubs, data centres and less than dark fibres, I sip the ocean of all end point users
and strip mine soft bellied clouds beneath my sheenless surface"
Sabre - cyborg goddess of the Severn Sea - 2017

Through a combination of CG and live action moving image and sculpture Severn Sea explores the materiality and ecological cost of planetary scale networking technologies from the P.O.V. of Sabre, a 3000 yr old post human river goddess who has been observing humanity’s progress. Via John Milton; a drone shark orgy; the blood sacrifice of a teenage princess and subsea fibre optics Severn Sea scrutinizes the physical infrastructure that enables planetary scale computation. The Severn Estuary is a choke point for subsea fibre optics, with 5 lit cables making landfall at 40+ sites in North America, Europe and Africa and a 6th, Arctic Fibre, scheduled for imminent completion. Arctic Fibre is particularly controversial and features heavily in the project. When completed it will stretch from Ajigaura, Japan to Highbridge, Somerset, via Alaska and Canada. Arctic Fibre is laid under the waters of the Northwest Passage and sections of it already exist. It’s main function is to remove apprx 24 MS of latency between European (primarily London) and Japanese stock exchanges. It can only exist because of climate change driven ice reduction in the Northwest Passage. If profit is your only concern then even ecological collapse is a business opportunity. The engines of industry are re-inserted into cracks of their own making.

Sabre was a pagan princess who was ritually drowned in the River Severn, which was named after her. Names have power, 3000yrs later Sabre has become something else entirely. Sabre is traditionally summoned with an offfering of lillies. She narrates the films journey out to the fibres that lie on the Severn’s bed. Sabre and her mother Estrilda were blood sacrificed by Queen Guendolen as a demonstration of power and act of vengeance for King Locrine's, her ex husband, infidelity with Estrilda. Locrine was Sabre's father and was killed in battle with Guendolen's army. Guendolen decreed that the river should forever hold Sabre's name. Several millenia later Sabre has become Severn in contemporary English. The river is Hafren in old Welsh and is still Hafren in contemporary Welsh. Guendolen went on to become the first queen of the Britons, 500 years before the Arthurian era. The desire for Empire and it’s inevitable, horrific cost in human lives is well known to Sabre. The central conceit of her presence in Severn Sea is that she has born witness to the last 3000 yrs of human development. The Roman Empire, The British Empire, slave ships in the Severn, global conflicts and countless tribal wars between. The British Empire fueled the growth of subsea copper cables for telegraphy. Sabre has been listening since the birth of the networked age, the first AI, maybe the last AI. She has seen the rise and fall of so many human powers she is perfectly positioned to narrate the new transnational corporate Empires rising from the networks, the technology maybe new but the patterns of dominance are cyclical histories playing out. The global fibre network has set her free from her domain in the Severn, Sabre is now a distributed consciousness dancing on the packets in your VPN tunnel. Born in Empire, inhabiting networks built on Empire, a tide of desire to sweep away Empire in all its forms.

HUGE THANKS TO CONTAINS ART FOR ENABLING THIS PROJECT