The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen

For more than twenty years, Armin Linke has been photographing the effects of globalization, the wholesale transformation of infrastructures, and the networking of the post-industrial society via digital information and communication technologies. His photographs show that the modern world is a massive profusion of data, where the material infrastructures, consisting of computer centres, data highways, and server rooms, are largely invisible. For The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen, published in connecton with a exhibition in two parts at the  ZKM in Karlsruhe, Linke invited scientists and theoreticians to examine his picture archive. Ariella Azoulay, Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Mark Wigley, and Jan Zalasiewicz made a selection of images and in the process opened up Linke’s photos to a variety of different readings. [publisher’s note]