Ansh Patel is an interdisciplinary artist whose works range from experimental games, digital media installations, performances, visual art, network + data applications and surveillance interventions. He is also a critic whose work has appeared in different literary and academic publications like Arcade Review, The New Inquiry, Model View Culture, Unwinnable and Paste Magazine.
AnimalNet playfully deconstructs oncoming live TCP/IP packets and visualizes their deconstructed form and function onto a projected screen in the form of mini narratives of animal graphics (frogs & rabbits) to serve both as an interactive and pedagogical tool.
As the GIF illustrates albeit in a text form, each frog represents a single packet and its characteristics illustrate the packet's structure and the frog's action showcase the packet's function. As the user interacts with the installation, more frogs will conjure out of air, that simultaneously attempts to reveal the underlying infrastructure of our normal web activities while invoking absurdity.
An interactive fiction that combines data and speculative theory to imagine networks and their infrastructure in the anthropocene. Using datasets on submarine cable maps/landing points, sea level rise projection models, energy usage, Networks in the Anthropocene, allows its players to experience numerous scenarios where networks and their underlying infrastructure as it exists today, will have to be radically reimagined compared.
Taking inspiration from speculative science-fiction from the 1960s Soviets that mixes both utopian and dystopian scenarios while building its visualization on existing climate change models, Networks in the Anthropocene wishes to ask us how the vectors of communication and thus power will be altered as the world belatedly prepares to deal with the problems we face in this epoch. Like the speculative sci-fi it's inspired by, it seeks to both inspire imagination and awaken us to the realities we face.