3 Years and 6 Months of Digital Decay


(2016-2019)
Shinji Toya


On this website, a video work Is There Beauty in Forgetting? (2015) has been screened since 7th April 2016: the date of the launch of the site. The video speculates about aesthetic meanings of forgetting in the digital age. As months and years pass, the image of the video at the site will be more and more fragmented (decayed) until eventually the video disappears on 7th October 2019.

The duration between this date and the launch date of the site corresponds with the average lifetime of burned CD-R media, that is three and half years. This lifespan was indicated by Kurt Gerecke: a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland. CD-Rs have limited lifetime due to material decay, and this aspect has been adapted to the website art so that the video’s lifespan will be also limited as if it suffers from material decay.

The website is a platform to observe what it would be like to have a decaying data online. And the project explores possibilities of digital decay that can be thought as a type of forgetting of digital data.


-- Shinji Toya Website --

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