Exhibition

Passing Data — Upcycling the Digital

Veneta Androva, Raphaël Bastide, Bruno Gola, Kathrin Hunze, Yehwan Song, Shinji Toya

Acting sustainably means looking beyond ourselves and thinking about how the present will affect the future. We zoom out, broaden our view to gain distance and make space for those who come after us. What do we want to maintain and pass on? What do we want to keep? What can we let go of?

With COPY PASTE WASTE, we relate these questions to digital sustainability and ask: what consequences does digitization have for our future lives in the world? Digital space may seem intangible, but it is firmly anchored in our physical world. Digital infrastructure consists of devices, buildings, and cables, and is built from metals, rare earths, rubber, plastic, concrete, and much more. Our current internet was built to facilitate the highest possible data flow, which consumes energy, water and other resources.

The fundamental logic of the data economy determines the internet’s entire architecture. Users are continuously being asked to produce data, but are increasingly less able to control it. We find it hard to understand where our data is stored and how we can manage it. As storage capacities and cloud services grow, the system removes the need to delete data. But over half of all data stored in clouds is no longer needed. Data becomes an obscure mass that loses meaning and is waste. Like in outer space, huge amounts of waste float around on the internet, consuming energy and having a detrimental effect on our environment.

In the exhibition Passing DataUpcycling the Digital, we take an experimental approach to data waste. To this end, we invited six artists to test upcycling as a speculative method for reusing old data. On their computers, in the cloud or on hard drives, they searched for files that they had no use for anymore. Artists then paired up to exchange images, fonts, videos, sounds and codes to incorporate into their own artistic practice. Creating a space — or ‘nest’ — for these files, they then used them for ongoing projects, as a springboard or a source of inspiration for developing new ideas.

Artworks created in this way address data waste and its impact on the environment; new images are created from this waste that highlight the internet’s hidden insfrastructure. They tell stories of mindful digital coexistence and address the question of how we want to create a digital space in which everyone can participate, now and in the future.

TEREZA HAVLÍKOVÁ and KATHARINA VON HAGENOW

Artists

Veneta Androva
Raphaël Bastide
Bruno Gola
Kathrin Hunze
Yehwan Song
Shinji Toya