When sailors return to land after months at sea, they often have the impression that the ground ripples in the same way as the ocean surface. What generates this feeling of imbalance? It is not known for sure, but it is believed that when at sea for a prolonged period of time, the brain generates a dynamic modulation in opposition to the movement of water. The result is a feeling of stability that makes us forget the movement of the ship after a few days. On returning to port, sailors feel as if the dry land has turned into water, reducing the abyss between the terrestrial and the maritime worlds. This humid experience of space, neither completely wet nor entirely dry, opens the portal that I propose to explore here. 

When I started writing I felt an unbearable vertigo every time I sat down in front of my computer. Such was the feeling of imbalance that I thought I had become completely disenchanted with writing; words appeared as a frozen cage for my intuitions. This disenchantment took an unexpected turn when, after a conversation with the Colombian poet Ramona de Jesús, I understood the vertigo I felt in front of the screen to be the same as that of sailors returning to port. Somehow, my land was beginning to moisten. So, I thought: if writing is like getting on a ship for months, what seas have I been on and what ports have I returned to?

What follows is a journey through three ports where my imagination has docked over the past few months, in search of expanding my ability to sense radically different ways of understanding technology. These ports are shaken by the vertigo I have felt in returning to writing from the seas of intuition, as I seek to involve my readers in this vertiginous and humid experience. Slowly I begin to see that my research around water is nothing more than a response to the call of rivers, lakes and seas in which I have bathed, who ask me to moisten my thoughts and my words. Reason, dry and sterile, is a failed project. Intuition, humid and fertile, will give voice to the deep and distant waters that desire to be heard. 

Thanks to the reading group of my first draft with Zenaida Osorio, Bárbara Santos, Maytik Avirama, Mariana Murcia and Lucas Jaramillo, I understood that telepathy allows me to think precisely about the way we involve ourselves with what is distant from us. Unlike the institutional discourses around telecommunication technologies, which omit any reference to the infrastructures that allow the flow of messages, I am interested in thinking about our involvement with those things that are in-between—that which mediates the transmission of a message. Faced with the socio-environmental collapse in which we are immersed, what does a reflection on technology, water, and telepathy contribute to our ability to imagine other realities? I want to propose humid telepathy as a tool to feel-think what is in-between, to sustain the life of what is close to us and what is distant from us at the same time. I hope that this humid perspective on the digital revolution will allow us to imagine technology beyond the systems of extraction that currently sustain it. The following ports seek to ripple the earth of our imagination, to explore technologies that embrace the interdependence between the digital world and the material world, between territory and information. 

Between the visible and the invisible 

On the first port, I was told that writing about telepathy inevitably invokes the world of the invisible. When I mention the word telepathy to those close to me, the most common image that springs to mind is that of one person transmitting precise information to another—usually a word or a number—without the need for language. Telepathy seems to involve direct communication that does not depend on the translation processes of common mediation. This understanding of telepathy is closely related to a long-standing ambition of modern technoscience: to eliminate the apparent limitations of distance and increase the speed of transmission. The common use of the preposition tele, which accompanies almost all inventions of electronic communication, seeks to emphasize this distance eliminated by technical devices: television, telematics, telephone, telegraph, and recently, due to the pandemic of covid-19, teleshopping, teleworking, telemedicine or teleducation. Rather than reminding us of the time and space that our information traverses as it travels through the network, the common use of the preposition highlights our ability to eliminate distance in seeing, speaking, writing, shopping, and working. The modern imagination understands telepathy—the ability to sense the other and the world at a distance—from the elimination of that distance between the bodies sending and receiving a message. In this way, the extraction and transmission of information is maximized and the illusion that capital can be detached from the material world, floating from cloud to cloud, from abstraction to abstraction, is strengthened. 

However, the electronic revolution relies on a series of material infrastructures interconnected at a planetary level. Between millions of devices, thousands of data centers, and hundreds of undersea cables, the digital cloud is more like a colossal kraken on the seabed extending its tentacles over land. The term infrastructure is commonly understood as a stable, material background on which social relationships develop. Yet, infrastructure is a relational concept that allows us to sense the hidden processes that we usually take for granted. Even more, it refers to the network of symbolic and material systems that give meaning to reality. Although modern infrastructures aspire to the homogenization of procedures by concealing their presence from our visual and narrative spaces, technology and its tangible systems are an active agent of the material and symbolic relations of the spaces and times they occupy. In this sense, reflecting on technological infrastructures allows us to see the relations that occur in the spaces in between, and to invoke the kraken-machine on which the digital revolution depends. 

Having invoked our monster ally, my attention turns to the maritime dimension of the Internet infrastructure, composed of signal repeaters, submerged data centers, and undersea cables that have been installed since 1858. From its inception, this infrastructure has been closely related to the history of colonialism and capitalism in three main ways. First, the sea routes followed by these cables emerge from the trade routes that mobilize the global market, which in turn originate in the routes traced by the colonial fleets during the first decades of European imperial expansion. The flow of consumer goods and digital data that sustains contemporary capitalism converge in the transoceanic infrastructures inaugurated by Columbus. Since then, the purpose of these infrastructures has been to maximize the speed of extraction and commercialization of material and informational goods. Between ships and transoceanic cables, the ancient metropolis is still able to control its territories at a distance, exercising a telepathy aimed at the control, extraction, and infinite reproduction of capital. 

Second, digital devices, cables, and data centers are built with minerals such as gold, quartz, cobalt, silicon, lithium or tin, typically extracted from mines in the global south. When these infrastructures become waste, they are exported back to these same locations in order to keep the streets of the North pristine, polluting the ecosystems of the South and the communities that care for them. Third, the silicon valley monsters emerging from the depths of the digital revolution design interfaces for ever faster transactions, video calls with no delays, passwords stored in DNA, and ever more immersive virtual worlds. In this way, computer multinationals manage to extract data at breakneck speed and sell it to the highest bidder, fueling the unbridled growth of contemporary information capitalism. Little by little, a global minority withdraws into the digital world while the rest live between the spectacle of screens and the ferocious extractive practices that destroy their territories. 

In this essay I will not engage in an extensive discussion of each of these three domains of extraction that define digital infrastructures, which I have discussed elsewhere. However, I want to highlight how the principle of extraction is deeply linked to the separation between information and infrastructure, between the measurable and the ineffable, between the invisible and the visible. Already in 1977, the Chilean artist Juan Downey commented that "wars against humanity and nature (i.e., the violent extraction of the fruits of the earth) have constituted both the raison d'être and the incentive for the urgent development of technology. Misapplied technology generates apparent wealth, but in the process creates dissonance in the interaction between humanity and nature". More than forty years later, the war described by Downey becomes a planetary crisis, due to a technological imagination that understands land and oceans as sources of resources and as passive containers for the flow of goods. In this scenario, how else might we understand telepathy, that powerful ability to sense ourselves at a distance? 

In his phenomenological study on the gestures of modernity, Vilém Flusser suggests that the prefix tele implies our approach to distance, an intersubjective dimension of relating. The distant always implies the near, the possibility of understanding what concerns and affects us, what binds us with that which we cannot see and do not experience up close. Thus, when we know something that is different or distant, we are, at the same time, knowing what is familiar and close. Flusser's words ripple the lands of this first port, inviting me to think of telepathy from a more complex dimension of communication, beyond the suppression of distance and time between the nodes of a network. In a more voluminous and profound sense, telepathy refers to our relationship with otherness and the capacity we have to engage in relationships with what is different and distant to us, both in the material and immaterial dimensions. Unlike the obsession of modern technoscience with optimizing the transfer of discernible information, the telepathy that interests me refers to the capacity of bodies to sense at a distance; in other words, by pathos as the center of communication. I will return later to the question of the body in relation to telepathic communication. 

Although the electronic telepathy that we perform with our computers seems to eliminate what is in between, distance always implies a spatial and temporal interstice that we cross, both at high and low speeds, between us and that which interests us, that which affects us. In the space between the visible and the invisible, conceiving telepathy from a relational and material perspective allows us to imagine beyond the division between subjects, objects, and their material environments, a logic that characterizes both coloniality and modernity. Technology constantly dialogues with the biological and geological substrates it traverses and which, to a large extent, sustain it. Energy and matter are inseparable. In order to reformulate our relationship with technology it is imperative to make this shift towards the connections between digitality and materiality. In other words, my interest lies in understanding what sustains the possibility of telepathy, from servers and undersea cables, to the water, minerals, and plants that allow us to store and care for our shared memories. Human beings participate in this web of energetic transference that surpasses us and at the same time embraces us, from where knowledge is generated and transmitted on a planetary level. I return to the sea from this invisible port, crossing my screen like a water surface, a membrane to other worlds that reflect our images distorted by the waves of their rippling movement. 

Telepathic perspectivism

Some years ago, I dreamt that the ocean flooded all the continents, exceeding the most pessimistic predictions about climate change. Faced with such a scenario, we humans had found a way to separate our consciousness from our bodies. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to survive submerged in the ocean’s salty water without corroding the epidermal membrane that protects our internal tissues. Those who had managed to survive the catastrophe inhabited millions of cables that snaked between underwater ruins, installed just before the dissolution of the bodies. The fiber optic cables that had sustained the internet for decades had multiplied exponentially to prevent the human species from disappearing, allowing it to prolong its existence in the form of electrical impulses. 

In the subtle space between my dream and reality, I dock at a port full of mirrors where the seas and the air of the earth are heating up. Although modernity has always dreamt of the possibility of separating mind and body, a paradigm that permeated my own dream, the acute ecological crisis constantly reminds us that this Cartesian desire is a nightmare unanchored from the reality we inhabit. Separated from the material world, the narratives that construct our relationship with digital technology are insufficient and limited. From the minerals that make up microprocessors—such as lithium, brass, quartz, gold, silica or cobalt—to the infrastructures that enable the storage and distribution of information—such as data centers or fiber optic cables—digital technology is closely related to the mineral world. The exploration of this geological dimension of media raises questions about the deep spatial and temporal roots of contemporary media, as well as about their possible futures. 

Ecological and material awareness of digital technology has been a fundamental axis of the work of artists and thinkers in Latin America since the mid-twentieth century, guided by the encounter of multiple technological ontologies—or cosmotechnics, as Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui refers to them. Inspired by the techno-spiritual experiments of the 1960s and mobilized by a desire to return to Latin America in the wake of the coup d'état to the socialist government of Salvador Allende, Juan Downey made a series of trips between New York and Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela between 1973 and 1977. The goal of his journeys was to create an inter-American audiovisual network, exchanging videotaped accounts from the hand of indigenous communities throughout Latin America, projecting in each community what had been filmed along the way. Through this project, called Video Trans Americas, Downey envisioned a system of videoconferencing among Amerindian peoples, two decades before the popularization of the internet as a globalized means of communication. In sum, this long-term exchange sought to generate a decentralized network of ontological feedback among the native peoples of the continent, where each community could see itself observing itself and observing others. 

The last trip of this project took Downey to the Venezuelan Amazon, where he lived with Yanomami communities. There he shared the closed-circuit television system, which interested the indigenous people because it did not freeze time through a capture, but allowed them to see a space from another perspective at the same time. Downey commented that closed-circuit television allows one "to observe oneself by observing, it increases the concentration of the mind". His anthropological exercise went beyond the act of looking at others, prompting the viewer "to see oneself by seeing how those others saw him", as Nicolas Guagnini comments, thus creating a sort of technological perspectivism. Framed within the systemic thinking of cybernetics, where bodies and territory make up a network of relationships that sustains life on the planet, Downey's approach to technology and its possibilities is marked by an interest in the dynamics that maintain the balance between human beings and their environment, based on communication as the central axis. In this sense, communication is nothing more than the encounter with otherness, a process of simultaneous reflection and self-reflection between beings and their environments. 

Three decades later, artist Bárbara Santos began a series of projects with indigenous communities of the Colombian Amazon. From 2005 to the present day, the collaborative research developed by Santos seeks to build bridges between the ancestral technologies of Amerindian peoples and the digital technologies of modernity. In interviews conducted for her book Healing as Technology, several Amazonian knowers speak of their use of feathers, plants, quartz, and other minerals to connect with their homes from afar as well as to care for the multi-species relationships within their territories. The electronic devices that fuel the digital revolution, such as sound and image recorders as well as computers, make use of similar minerals to enable communication between places separated by space and time: "minerals in both ancestral and Western knowledge are equally used as systems of recording and memory”. Although there are multiple differences between the two technological forms, starting with the fact that modern technology depends on the violent extraction of minerals, the comparative and relational research developed by Santos expands what we commonly understand as technology. In this dialogue between two seemingly irreconcilable realities, technology appears as a way of transmuting energy and matter, where care emerges as a central axis of technological development. Considering technology from the perspective of healing allows us to understand our relationship with what is in-between, a relational telepathy of the visible and invisible environments we inhabit. 

From his travels and artistic collaborations with indigenous communities, Downey comments that "in some human beings, brain waves are in symbiosis with natural phenomena: communication with others and with the environment is total”. The totality of this type of communication lies beyond the transmission of clear and concise information through language, and is closer to a kind of telepathy that connects through affection and intuition. The traditional knowers of the Amazon care for and administer their territories from malocas, houses that enable them to connect to networks of knowledge from within and beyond their geographic location. As Santos says, "sacred places from ancestral knowledge are a network of places, close to what we can understand as a network between nodes of internet servers, a rhizome of dynamic knowledge based on stories of origin, layers of geological knowledge, systemic ecology intrinsically linked to culture and medicine”. Spiritual navigation, assisted by plants, minerals and sacred architectures, allows knowers to travel through the multiple bodies and structures that compose this network of reality. The telepathy at the core of Amazonian technologies, which allows knowers to feel and think the ecological networks of the forest from a distance, enables the care of life-affirming relations. 

Just as digital technology is sustained by the flow of light and electrical impulses through cables and servers, the technology of Amerindian communities is sustained by the flow of energy through life itself. In the end, both infrastructures are two sides of the same coin, even if digital technology insists on separating its total symbiosis with the material world. In his essay “Architecture, Video and Telepathy”, Downey comments that video, thought, and the universe share the same electromagnetic nature, and that "if we manage to enter the wave correctly [...] we can conceive of telepathy, teleportation, and even teleroticism: libidos acting at a distance, collective tantric sex, fusion of lights”.  Although there is a techno-optimistic echo in Downey's words, characteristic of the expectations tied to electronic developments in the 1970s, the telepathy he speaks of rejects the productive control that dominates the digital technologies of our era. Similar to Santos, Downey imagined the possibility of decolonizing technology as an apparatus of extraction and domination, reconfiguring its power to generate global telepathic networks to reconcile and care for difference. Although Santos' work has a more extended and collaborative dimension than that developed by Downey, both artists expand our understanding of technology through an awareness of the deep relationship between the visible and the invisible worlds. To decolonize technology is precisely to recognize that interstitial materiality, the relationship of our bodies and territories to the technologies that connect us. 

The distance between the two technological ontologies I have described thus far is similar to the distance that separates me from Amerindian knowledge. My access to the ancestral knowledge of the Amazon has almost always been from a distance, an exercise of relational telepathy that invites me to speak through the words of those I read and converse with. Although I traveled to Leticia, the capital of the department of Amazonas in Colombia, for the first time in mid 2022, my relationship with this territory has been mediated to a great extent by my sister Camila Pacheco, anthropologist and designer, my friend Maytik Avirama, human ecologist and sound artist, and my friend Bárbara Santos, an artist whose work is a fundamental part of this and other essays I’ve written. My relationship with the philosophical thought of the Amazon has been from a distance, mediated by the affection I share with these three women whom I admire so much. The telepathy that interests me does not rely solely on digital devices, but also on conversations, relationships, and experiences that are transmuted to allow us to sense our connection with places we do not directly inhabit. To confront today's ecological crisis, telepathic perspectivism will become increasingly important, as it generates spaces for listening to that which is distant and different to us, which do not prompt us to dominate. 

One of the axes of Amazonian ontology is the capacity to inhabit the multiple perspectives that make up the same territory. In this way, perspectivism affirms difference as the central axis of the recognition of the other, extending this human quality to all the actors in a particular territory. The relationship between art, technology, and anthropology allows for the possibility of seeing the same territories and bodies from multiple perspectives. In art we can imagine technologies beyond extraction, guided by intuition as we weave bridges between multiple ways of feeling, thinking, and communicating at a distance. In sum, what I am proposing that we call telepathic perspectivism is very close to artistic thinking and dreaming, allies of the cosmic waters that make up life. It is the set of portals that peer into the abyss between radically different realities. Telepathic perspectivism opens a humid portal to approach technology as a relational and more-than-human performance, which allows for the transformation of energy and matter between territories at a distance. In the middle of the night, I abandon the port’s lighthouse in search of even darker waters. 

Water and energy

The day I was born, the planets aligned around water and technology, opening an electrical portal between the salt in my body and the waters that permeate it. My sun is in Cancer, the crab ruled by the moon and the ocean, two material bodies in constant tension. My moon is in Aquarius, the dolphin that inhabits electric waves to make room for technology and the unconventional. In the space between the sun and the moon, the day and the hour I was born manifest a triangle between my body, water, and electricity. From this cosmic point of view, it is not by chance that almost all of my research in recent years has delved into the relationship between water and technology. All our thoughts and intuitions share the same energy of atoms and celestial bodies. We are vehicles and agents of the deep entanglements between the material and the ineffable, between matter and energy. As I arrive to this new port where I find my astral body, the future of water reveals itself as the future of our bodies, just as the future of our bodies manifests itself in the time of water. To think that technology allows us to detach ourselves from our corporeality is not only a fatal error, but also an outright fallacy. 

Through texts, videos, sounds, web projects, and laboratories, my work since 2016 has immersed me in the poetic and material relationships between water and technology, seeking to weave new narratives to navigate technological waves from an ecological and transhistorical awareness. From the words we use to understand the digital world-—such as cloud, torrent, streaming, surfing, sailing, etc.—to the undersea cables that enable the global flow of information, the internet bears a close relationship to ocean waters on multiple levels. In addition to being a container for much of the internet’s  infrastructure, the ocean is also an energetic medium that enables the flow of information on a planetary scale. Due to its high salinity, the sea floor provides a perfect grounding pole for the electrical current that amplifies the signal flowing through undersea cables. Our emails, video calls, images and sounds are not only contained by ocean water, but depend on it to operate. As Nicole Starosielski comments, “after power crosses the cable, it is routed to an ocean ground bed that grounds intercontinental currents; the ocean completes the cable circuit”. The internet's undersea network relies entirely on the electrical conductivity of the aquatic environment, enhanced by the salinity of the seas. As Amerindian cultures have known since time immemorial, salt is a crystal that enables the communication between multiple forms of life.

Some recent Microsoft experiments also seek to take advantage of the physical properties of the ocean, designing data centers that use the low temperatures of the seabed to cool the servers. In this way, Silicon Valley companies seek to save on the cost of energy used to cool the high temperatures produced by data processing. As global temperatures continue to rise, I foresee more and more data centers submerged in the ocean depths, further heating the seas in order to continue the expansion of the computer network. An infinite web of catastrophes unleashed by the insistence of technological progress. This utilitarian way of harnessing water as an energy medium, which allows both electrical conductivity and heat dissipation, are part of a long genealogy. The power of water has been the basis of multiple technological systems that have enhanced the colonization of modernity over all other cosmotechnics, from the hydraulic mill to hydroelectric dams. 

Unlike these extractive systems that reduce water to an inert substance full of potential energy, recognizing the role of water as container and medium allows me to approach telepathy from a relational dimension, bringing to the surface the question of proximity. To humidify telepathy is, then, to see what is in-between rather than ignoring it and trying to eliminate it. Electrical impulses, one of the many forms in which planetary consciousness manifests, cannot be separated from our territories and their material infrastructures. Submarine cables, data centers, windmills and hydroelectric plants are bodies linked to the body of the earth and to our own bodies. Downey reminds us that "electromagnetic energy is a river of undulating material. This radiant nature is shared by thoughts, artificial intelligence and video, and explains the very life of the Universe we inhabit". My proposal is that we immerse ourselves and swim in this consciousness, in its multiple volumes. This way of approaching water allows us to reimagine how we contain it and how it contains us, and thus rescue the possibility of caring for what is distant and different from us. 

Deep and expanded reflection with water is essential to reimagine and reshape our relationship with technology. In principle, because water is essential: it is the substance that keeps life in constant movement and transmutation. Water allows us to feel the interconnectedness between every body as wet matter. From the osmosis that permits the exchange of solvents between cells to the water cycle that connects distant territories, water sets in motion the metabolisms of energetic and material exchange that make up the planetary biosphere. The wet relations of amniotic, salivary, rainy, tropical and stagnant liquids are part of this telepathic dimension of water, a technology of connection with otherness at a distance. Water—be it liquid, solid or gaseous—is an archive of life, an intercontinental, interplanetary and intertemporal telepathic communication system. Water is an intelligent network, a constantly transforming source of knowledge, transforming geological formations from the highest mountains to the deepest trenches at the bottom of the ocean.

Water also organizes the world as a voluminous field: up and down, surface and depth, back and forth, right and left, inside and outside. In the ocean, the configuration of surface and depth are in constant flux. The one becomes the other in a continuous intensity of motion. Depth rises to the surface only to descend again; surface submerges and becomes depth. In this sense, water connects us to other geological layers and to the passage of time: a spatial and temporal connector. The wet ontology proposed by Phillip Steinberg and Kimberly Peters rightly invites us to embrace the depth and volume of the ocean as crucial elements to destabilize fixed and solid categories, from the ways in which we are implicated with multiple bodies and systems.

More than wet, humid refers to that in-between space between solid and liquid. Although the artist Roy Ascott spoke in the 1990s about moist media to refer to biotechnology, the humidity I speak of is closer to that felt in the tropics; that sticky sensation on the skin when we are in the jungle that invites us to engage with our surroundings. Tropicalizing technology is, then, recognizing the sticky and humid encounter between bodies at a distance, a sensation that goes beyond the desire to understand. Wet telepathy is that encounter of love that does not apprehend, that appreciates but does not dominate. It is the listening to the sensory noise of our environment. When we allow ourselves to enter into contact with water in a conscious and present way, an inexhaustible source of information is activated. 

In most genesis myths, life originates in water. In many Amerindian cultures, and in some of the most recent research from modern science, it is considered that water is capable of retaining this vital memory, like a living archive. The wisdom-keepers of the ancestral cultures of the Amazon follow a rigorous ecological calendar to enter into dialogue with the memory of the rivers. Depending on the time of the year and the day, the river tells different stories about the origin of the world, the state of its headwaters and mouths, and how to organize work for the coming year. The knowledge of each knower is specific to their territorial context, and at the same time it allows them to connect with the spaces that water travels through on a planetary level. Although the experience of a knower in the Amazon is radically different from that of those of us who inhabit the modernized and urban world, the Amerindian cosmovision teaches us that water is not a passive material to be exploited or protected; water is an active agent with which we can commune. From this perspective, mediated by our bodies, we can begin to draw other kinds of maps of the forms of marginality and belonging that emerge from the common waters that we share with the planet and its multiple forms of life.

The speed at which this wet telepathy operates is different from the speed of digital telepathy. In a way, it is slower and more voluminous, similar to the flow of time to which water currents refer us to. Rivers, streams and oceans are not homogeneous bodies of water; they are composed of multiple currents of different temperatures and intensities, constantly converging in a non-linear fashion. In this sense, accessing the living archive of water is closer to an exercise in correspondences, reminiscent of Denise Ferreira da Silva's invitation to investigate and write from the depth, breadth, length and time of events. "The images of poetic thought are not linear (transparent, abstract, glassy and determined), but fractal (immanent, scalar, abundant and indeterminate), like most of what exists in the world”. Humid telepathy speaks from a non-linear and fractal perspective, embracing the depth of the ocean and the multivalence of water currents.

Unlike the Platonic idea that reality emanates as a shadow from the sun, I believe that reality emanates from the shadows of the watery depths pulled by the moon’s embrace. The humid, pressurized, dark depths of the ocean radiate a wet energy into the world, filling it with water and thus with life. This is the cosmology of the underworld, the place of the high priestess, of the fungi and their infinite cycles. The origin is not a sun; it is a telepathic force from the depths of the sea. This sea is, however, as external as it is internal, similar to Flusser's abyss, where the depths of the ocean are indistinguishable from the depths of ourselves. Telepathy is this exercise of knowing the distant in order to know the near; of seeing ourselves reflected in the world as an erotic mirror that is impossible to colonize and exploit. As I leave this astral and energetic port, I abandon my ship and jump into the sea. 

Becoming a dolphin

When I am far from Colombia, I often dream that I become a dolphin that travels through the Atlantic until I find the mouth of the Magdalena River. Then, at the height of Buenavista I go up the Río Negro until I find the Tobia River and from there up the San Juan River. There, in San Juan de La Vega, an always humid and fertile land, lives half of my imagination. My imagination travels at the speed of water currents that, like time, are multiple and voluminous, populated by currents of all temperatures, enveloping each other: up and down, back and forth, inside and outside. Colombia is a colonial fiction that designates an amphibious territory, traversed by thousands of waters that humidify the mountains as they flow down to the sea. The more we inhabit these dreamlike currents, I foresee that we will slowly become dolphins, those mammals that, after tasting the dryness of the land, decided to return to the sea and the river. Abandoning all ports, each one of us will have to find the depth and salinity of our own ocean. Every end is a departure.

In the space between land and water, our transformation will begin with a sensation of vertigo as our vestibular apparatus adapts to a new voluminous coordination, like sailors returning from the sea. The neuroplasticity that Catherine Marabou speaks of will give way to an ever larger cerebellum, like that of dolphins, to allow us to find our balance in deep water. Then, our eyes will begin to distort our perception of space, like rippling landscapes reflected in water surfaces. We will see our distorted reflection, widening the portal to our depths. When we complete our metamorphosis, we will perceive with greater amplitude the frequencies that escape our sensory field. The water will be our new screen, a border and a portal at the same time. Becoming a dolphin will be the way in which water’s life archive will pass through our bodies and become consciousness. 

Inspired by my friend and artist Mariana Murcia, in the last few months I have bathed in icy waters in Holland and Spain. After some breathing exercises that warm up the core of the body, entering icy waters is a discharge of memories. The muscles tense and the atomic bonds of the skin are activated, as if an electric wave were running through the membrane that separates us from what is external and distant. The first time I bathed in the Maas River at the end of November, I was invaded by the memory of the electricity that gave rise to life in the sea, molecules excited by deep temperature changes. From her deep relationship with the ancestral knowledge of the Amazon, Bárbara Santos reflects that "Western culture, by delegating memory to books, computers, photographs, etc., does not know how to activate memory through the body”. Through eating, singing and dancing, many indigenous knowers activate the electric memories of deep times contained in the body. In a parallel world, when I swim in the icy waters of the Maas and of the Navalmedio dam I activate a memory of the origin of life. Technology is, fundamentally, this electric sea that flows through the membranes of our bodies.

Similar to the membranes of undersea cables, water is also a fundamental communication technology for living organisms. Through osmosis, cells in our body tissues exchange salts and molecules across their semi-permeable membranes. These membranes enabled the emergence of complex life in the ocean millions of years ago, driving the intertwined dependence between information and media. One unicellular bacterium engulfs the other and thus creates complex life. Multicellular life is the result of cannibalism between membranes, insisting on surviving inside each other in the vast Precambrian sea. Membranes are an artificial intelligence that creates the very notion of an inside and an outside, spaces where both difference and similarity emerge. In an interview with Barbara Santos, anthropologist Stephen Hugh Jones suggests that the body is a structure of tubes: "we are all tubes and to this extent our body is a tube containing other tubes in which there are openings: I speak through my mouth, I reproduce in the womb, etc.”. Between tubes, cables, and membranes, the body of the internet and our bodies are reflections of the same territory contained by planetary waters. 

So what rituals allow us to cross the material and semiotic membranes between ourselves, our environments, and other species? At what point does the subject begin and the environment end? In discussing the relationship between telepathy, architecture, and video, Juan Downey reminds us that the screen is also that pulsating refuge of exchange, a membrane between inner and outer myths. The screen or the surface of water, intermediate membranes, allow for constant mediation between the near and the distant. In this sense, wet telepathy reminds us that to know anything is to know oneself. Beyond grasping and understanding, humid telepathy invites us to immerse ourselves in the medium, and to love without the desire to decipher the other. The humid is human, and it is humus; the earth from which the possibility of growing and caring arises. In this fertile space of interpretation, emerges the possibility of relating beyond extraction. 

Every time I use a hydrophone to listen to the dolphins' home, I enter into a multi-temporal connection with water currents. The hydrophone transduces the vibrations within the water into electrical impulses, making it possible to listen and record beneath its surface. This transduction through media is fundamental to telepathy, which proposes a dialogue between spaces and agents in a game of semi-permeable messages. When I stop and listen to the clamor of the water flowing down from the páramo, I begin to feel like an agglomeration of spaces submerged in time; a continuous flow; a sea of events passing at different speeds. In the midst of the electric static, I begin to perceive the agency of other lifeworlds and to tune in to the multiple forces that shape our world and that do not depend on human will. The future of water will be to break down the walls that contain it, to overflow the spouts of cities and hydroelectric dams, and to humidify the wetlands withered by reason.

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Image 1: Figure 12.2 The bowl of wax - Barbara Santos

Image 2: Figure 12.3 The Blue Dot - Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano

Image 3: Deep Dream Waters

Image 4: Figure 12.1 by Juan Downey