Monumental Networks is an installative performance that explores the aesthetic and existential consequences of living within invisible systems of technological control. Drawing on Andrew Carreira’s Teatro de Invasão, the work intervenes in institutional space to expose the hidden architectures of connectivity—Wi-Fi signals, electromagnetic fields, algorithmic regulation.
Through spatial occupation, controlled light, and sonic disruption, the performance brings into focus what Mario Costa calls the technological sublime: the overwhelming sense of scale, power, and abstraction found in postmodern communication networks. Here, the performer is both node and disturbance, caught between the desire for control and the impossibility of grasping the systems that mediate perception, presence, and power.
In dialogue with Heidegger’s critique of technological reasoning, Monumental Networks reflects on how the machinic has come to define not just what we build, but how we think—reducing the world to what can be produced, formatted, and transmitted. The work resists this logic through interruption, opacity, and the activation of a space where bodies glitch, systems stutter, and meaning escapes regulation.
Exhibited at Edinburgh Napier University’s School of Creative Industries (2015). Awarded Best in Show.
Isadora Petrauskas 