a curatorial project
High Ping refers to excessively high network latency: a delay between a player’s action and the server’s response. A command has already been sent, but it takes a moment—or sometimes much longer—to receive a response. In the real world, our understanding of climate change, or more broadly, our relationship with the climate, is also marked by a kind of latency.
Extreme climate events are rarely sudden, isolated occurrences. Rather, they are shaped by long-term accumulated changes, complex ecological relationships, and effects that cross geographical boundaries. From melting glaciers and warming oceans to abnormal rainfall, droughts, and urban heatwaves, environmental changes move at different speeds and leave traces in distant places. We are facing a state of immense “high latency”—natural systems have already sent out signals, while human perception and response are still waiting.
High Ping transforms the internet café—a space once associated with public interaction, entertainment, and the exchange of information—into an exhibition site. Screens distributed across different locations function like nodes in a network, displaying moving images related to extreme climate events and environmental change. Rather than attempting to form an immediate and complete information system, they create a slower, dispersed relationship of viewing across different spaces.
As part of the Ripple 3.0 project, the exhibition uses the “ripple” as a way of understanding relationships between the environment and society: a small disturbance can travel through time and space, eventually producing a response somewhere far away. Climate change, personal memory, technological networks, and bodily perception become interconnected through these processes of transmission.
As a form of network malfunction, High Ping continually reminds us that we do not live in a world of instantaneous feedback. Instead, we are constantly receiving signals that have already occurred, are still spreading, and have yet to fully reach us.