Confederate Monument 2.0: Mary Ellen Carroll at “Prospect.3"

Since 2015, the discourse of public monuments has been dominated by questions of monument removals in the wake of the rise of the Rhodes Must Fall activist movement. However, prior to this emphasis on remov-als, there was also a strong tradition of contemporary artists proposing creative interventions that responded to the existing landscape of public monuments as markers of systemic inequalities. This essay focuses on an unrealised intervention proposed by New York-based artist Mary Ellen Carroll in the run up to the Prospect.3 contemporary art triennial in New Orleans in 2014, which aimed to transform a monument to Robert E. Lee into a transmitter for free-to-use, long-range, high-speed wireless internet. Drawing from scholar of media Florian Cramer, it suggests Carroll’s proposal to repurpose the Confederate monument was a post-digital choice that envisaged a radical solution to internet inequity while mobilizing the monument’s symbolism to attend to the history of structural discrimination shaping unequal internet access in contemporary New Orleans.