The Half Life of Data
CSIRO Discovery Centre, Canberra, May 2001
Artist's Statement
- When thinking of food, building, clothing, or any manufacturing, it's easy to visualize waste. But what about ideas, or information? We recognize that some ideas are out of date, useless, decayed, even toxic, and there may be lots of data or information which is similarly so.
- Data actually exists in physical formats, even e-data. Data waste is sometimes a factor of the deterioration of its material base (such as paper or film), and sometimes caused by a change in technology. Sometimes an attack on data is made through an attack on its physicality. The confusion and identification of data and its materiality could even be seen as an analogue of the idea/matter or mind/body duality that haunts (some of) us.
- In this set of works, I take familiar physical embodiments of data and information, in particular, paper books and printed products, and subject these to physical operations. These operations are the same ones that we use in the office environment to render data into waste ie cutting, tearing, obliteration by liquid paper, crumpling, and shredding. In every case I have kept only those results which reveal something about the nature of the original data that is not obvious in its pristine state.
- Nearly all of the materials in these works have been reclaimed from bins, discard piles, leftovers and remainders. My thanks go to the forces of progress and tidiness in my Faculty at the University of Melbourne. Thanks are also due to Kathi Holt-Damant for inadvertently bringing in a huge supply of unbound sections of a maritime novel whose pages form the basis of many of these works; to Peter Ho for some band-sawing suggestions, to Greg Missingham for his comments on mis-filing (a related idea, but unexplored in this series of works), and to Bernard Slattery for help with French colloquialism.
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Reversed Argument (detail) 2001
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Argument Over Evidence (detail) 2001
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Two Lines (detail) 2000
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Throwaway Lines: Haiku (detail) 2001
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Vertical Scan #2 (detail) 1998
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Book with Emerging Shreds (detail) 2001
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Striking Chords (detail) 2000
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Vertical Scan #4 (detail) 1998
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Scholar's Desk 2000
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Authorised by: Dr Alex Selenitsch, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning
Updated: 14 December 2006