ART
Bit rot No.1
5.5" x 9"
Collage on paper
2019
Series references the world of digital preservation's nightmare called 'bit rot', also known as 'data decay' or 'data degradation.' Like both natural and man-made material and matter all eventually degrades, digital files and content are just as ephemeral, even more so. We tend to think that digitizing everything will save it, but computer files decay, disappear, and also become inaccessible when software becomes outdated and file formats obsolete. I incorporated imagery of eternity and rebirth (serpentine shapes) and wove them through blocks of fragmentation and disintegration (pixelated forms and other historic artefacts). The colored land-use maps I found evoke pixels, mosaic tiling, Tetris, or even visualizations of computational data, or even map data of fragmented socio-political or geo-political boundary lines.