Data Fever

All media emit heat, a sign of life in the digital world. As data grows, so does the heat, yet a cooling apparatus maintains the data alive. Too warm for a second and the entire apparatus becomes nonfunctional. Digital archives are dependent on the cold and vulnerable to the warm.

In the feverish drive to record and store, the archive seeks permanence, a form of immortality. This compulsion to preserve, to make the transient permanent, may ultimately force us to confront what we must inevitably lose and to rethink our attempt to harness and preserve what is fluid and transient.

In our obsession to collect and predict, we’ve built a digital archive that is haunted by its own death drive. Without cooling technologies, digital media exhibit a death wish. The project examines this paradox: our desire for digital permanence existing in constant tension with the fragile materiality of the systems that sustain our virtual worlds.