An interactive installation tackling the theme of fragility of digital records and physicality of the cloud.
CREATED AT PANGENERATOR

#memory #digital-impermanence

Ephemeral cloud

“Everything Saved Will Be Lost”, the motto of the installation and the paraphrase of Nintendo video game system's shutdown screen, emphatically point out the illusive permanence of digital archives. Our alertness seems to be fast asleep, lulled by the blind faith in the almost transcendence of “the cloud”, which appears equipped with eternal and inexhaustible memory.

As the Vint Cerf, former president of Google once famously put:

“We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future”

What we readily ignore is the fact that the cloud is nothing but millions of physical hard drives stockpiled in data centres, owned by specific corporations and, despite precautionary measures, liable to fail or be hacked. We have decided to visualize this by transforming the digital representation of one's face (projected on-screen) into real gravel, spilling out behind the screen. This is a reminder to us all that without exception, the ephemeral cloud is likely to physically disintegrate.

The installation was a part of panGenerator's ICONS exhibition held at The National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw that presented a series of objects embodying various phenomena of digital culture.

Confronting the audience with their own face crumbling and falling apart aims to evoke reflection on fragility of our digital memories and way in which we perserve them.

The animation of the virtual paricles is tighltly synced wit the servo-controlled valves that dispense the real gravel falling from behind the edge of the screen.

Installation mixes digital and physical media - dissolving digital picture into pile of gravel, highlighting the fragility and impermanence of the data.

Produced at panGenerator in collaboration with Krzysztof Cybulski & Krzysztof Goliński. Check the project page here

Photos by Maciej Jędrzejewski

YEAR:
2017

TECHNIQUE:
projector, arduino, 8 servos, gravel, steel, code: nodejs

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
ars electronica, sxsw, wro biennale

COMMISSIONED BY:
etno museum warsaw