Trevor Paglen asks us to focus our attention on what cannot be easily seen. In 2015, Paglen travelled to photograph the undersea cables at specific locations in the Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. A year prior, the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed these sites as among those tapped by the United States Government’s National Security Agency. Paglen dives beneath the ocean surface to draw our attention to unseen structures of power and information.

Paglen learnt to scuba dive to take these photographs. While the large-scale prints offer an expansive view, for the artist, as a diver, the field of vision would have been limited. Looking into the blue-green shadows, we might expect to glimpse a reef shark, a scurrying crab, or the looming hull of a shipwreck. This might seem a timeless space; instead, these images reveal the vast and relatively new infrastructure of the internet. So often thought of as an intangible cloud, our digital networks rely upon the fibre-optic cables that criss-cross the ocean floor. These lines channel 99% of global data, often along the same routes first traced by telegraph cables.