"Cables to Sand" is an art project by Antonio Palacios Rojo, created for the Activation Series by TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza) and Tactical Tech. The work unfolds as a performative and digital walk from the submarine cable landing station in Sines, Portugal, to the nearby beach. During this walk, the artist recorded physical data — such as acceleration and force — stored in a CSV file. These points dynamically trigger visual effects on the website: distortions, pulses, and rotations that visually translate the labor behind this infrastructure.

At its core, it spotlights the EllaLink cable that links the Caribbean to Europe, including territories such as Curaçao, Trinidad. The piece confronts the hidden yet powerful systems — both technological and historical — embedded in undersea cables. These infrastructures not only transmit but also carry with them colonial residues, commercial legacies, and political hierarchies, now remapped through the logic of digitization.

The site continuously displays rotating phrases as animated teletype messages in the browser tab, repeating with mechanical rhythm. These textual fragments amplify themes of transcontinental connection, the body as interface, surveillance, information extraction, and the blurred boundary between the body and the virtual.

Antonio Palacios Rojo transforms walking into a critical act — making visible the human forces that sustain our digital world. The Caribbean, often cast as a peripheral zone, emerges here as a key place of dominance and power struggles. Through this gesture, the act of moving becomes an inquiry into the nature of contemporary data flows: who feeds the machine with their lives?