What Remains, Strategies of Saving and Deleting, 26 September – 27 November 2015
ESC Medien Kunst Labor, Graz, Austria

“When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure.”

– Jorge Luis Borges, The library of Babel

What will paint the most vivid picture of our culture in the far future: a snapshot of the data stored on hard disks around the world at this very moment in time, or the excavation of landfills full of obsolete hardware? We’re a society generating a deluge of digital information, which is impossible to store truly long term in its entirety. Yet in fear of a digital dark age we try hard, clinging to our precious information while leaking it out of every port of our computer. We’re obsessed. Our data bodies morbidly obese. Metaphors like the cloud promise infinite liposuction, delegating the storage of our excesses to what seems like outer space, yet our carbon footprint grows larger and larger with energy hungry data centers all over our planet.

What is it that we’re trying to save from decay? Certainly not earth itself. What are we so hungry to transmit to the future? What are the big ideas of our time and where can they be found? Future historians can go in search for them inside what is left of the machines we’ve build to keep our treasure. They might analyze what is left of the data we’ve produced. One idea of our time will surely remain, our information fetishism.