Reviews
![Film Review: InRealLife By Arub Saqib "But I thought the internet was a cloud?" What does a cloud buzzing with information from billions of people … look like? Where does it all go? How big is it? Can we… touch it? Nothing in real life is effortless. Yet the seamless ease of a status update could coax us into believing it is. So what does the back of house room for services as huge as facebook, twitter and google look like? How are these seemingly seamless services constructed and contained? Translating the flickering airy nothingness that appears on our screens into a physical mass may seem a perplexing task. The documentary InRealLife attempts to make this jump. [[MORE]] The film’s soundscape dramatically amplifies the buzzing and tapping on endless lengths of cable, like a spy listening acutely for any remote signs of movement. Mirroring the mysterious haze that the internet is lost to us in, this is the only hint we’re given of an ephemeral phenomenon scripting reality whilst all our eyes are seeing is a series of endless wires. Strand by strand, the film builds an image of the internet as a pervasive, physical and real entity in our every day lives, one that is taking up our time, money and space. The camera shifts from the users at the receiving end of the screens to eerie beeping alien warehouses quietly glowing in remote suburban locations. These static three dimensional walls mask the vastness that is the internet in a way intended to disengage. They are humanless, faceless and scaleless; a total anti-climax. Yet our interface with technology hasn’t always been this disconnected. The visionary libraries of Thomas Carlyle were monolithic bastions to new ideas and modes of communication in the 1830s. Libraries normalised and championed emerging technologies of their time, disseminating knowledge and nurturing engagement with cutting edge information. Pioneering creatives took the products of the Printing Press on as a challenge to produce an entirely new rich and sophisticated language to house this new way of doing things. These buildings fostered the interactions required for the masses to familiarise themselves with new technology. A similar challenge is now beckoning designers to humanise archives of fibre optics, wires wires wires and wires that knit together intricately to sustain data churning power houses. In their eerie empty corridors, machines take hold of what we squeeze on line. For now, the occupiers are only present through their data, and the currency they offer up is information. The speed and efficiency with which this data is allowed to travel is having phenomenal impacts on our real world. The cloud isn’t so ephemeral after all. With a new fibre optic cable costing $1b being laid directly under the now barely existent ice of the arctic between Tokyo and London, transactions are expected to allow £20b to flow on the line within the first week. This explosion of possibilities is what has led to 90% of the worlds data being produced in the last 2 years. High streets and off line service providers are closing up and making room for futures forecast; and the cloud is being left to roam as it pleases. Yet the physicality of this electrifying new world remains bleak for most of us. The internet’s real ingenuity is still limited to the cable work that allows for the seamless data flow of photons being fired at unprecedented speeds. For now, most of the designing is scripted, limited to the same language as everything else; data. Pretty drawings and marvellously complex layouts beautifully displayed on websites pass on line politely with silent, undisruptive and invisible ease. Perhaps designers are keeping a light touch for fear of overloading the delicate collective dream of clouds. What’s produced in these hubs is architecture within architecture. And if perchance you ever get to take a peek down the rabbit hole that is a fibre optic manhole you’ll be intrigued by the world that so much of our time and money and space is disappearing into. The Internet is not a cloud. Maybe designers have confused the space the internet is actually taking up with the cloud of dust that rose around them whilst they stuffed their heads in the sand, overcome by the idea of actually using up space to store tweets and facebook updates by tweens on homemade youtube videos … perhaps critically engaging with the junk space that is the internet could leave too distressing an impression of ourselves as a civilisation? Yet there is more potential to leverage than just that. InRealLife certainly leads us to believe so. I definitely left feeling this new technology is way too exciting for us to pass out on. Why should the internet be so clouded after all? Because what we’re putting into it certainly isn’t disappearing into thin air. InRealLife is out now in the UK, visit www.inreallifefilm.com/screenings for screenings.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/9fc79d428d40337a9077b26a88abe29b/tumblr_mtskhmy8kO1rx2fx5o1_500.jpg)
Film Review: InRealLife
By Arub Saqib
"But I thought the internet was a cloud?"
What does a cloud buzzing with information from billions of people … look like? Where does it all go? How big is it? Can we… touch it?
Nothing in real life is effortless. Yet the seamless ease of a status update could coax us into believing it is. So what does the back of house room for services as huge as facebook, twitter and google look like? How are these seemingly seamless services constructed and contained? Translating the flickering airy nothingness that appears on our screens into a physical mass may seem a perplexing task. The documentary InRealLife attempts to make this jump.