Steve's mashup

During my Bachelor. I made a project called “The Library of Babel” based on the short story by the same name by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. This project was made on the topic of “bit-rot” in text documents. This project got me really interesting in the long term storage of information and how we as society deal with it. A thread that goes through my previous projects [such as X Y and Z] are always these topics that I find interesting, but never get the attention I think they deservers.

[for instance] In my previous term at Piet Zwart I made the project “Imagery Storage Formats”, this project explored. With my random generating encyclopaedia of imagery storage formats I wanted to make fun of the computer industry and putting a question out to people, If the new formats are so good and as stable as they say they are, can you really believe them? Since the invention of electronic storage devices, there have been a lot of promises of the durability of the medium from their inventors. The computer industry have spent 50 years of over-promising and under-delivery. If the computer industry can make loft claims, why can I not make up my own collection of storage formats? With my random generating encyclopaedia of imagery storage formats. I wanted to make fun of the computer industry and put a question out to people; Are the new formats really so good that you can believe that you data is safe?

Today we are often promised instant relocation and storage for free. How does this effect our connection to what we make? And how does this supposedly “easy life” change what we make and think about how we store it? My interest in the topic of finding and spreading information and knowledge started early by visiting the school library at the age of nine for technology and history books. Later in life I made a computer game magazine when I was 13 years old. I had folders of images, texts and project files from the project, but even being incredibly careful where I saved them, moving them around from computers to floppy disks to other computers, it all got lost somewhere.