We live in a technocentric society. Willingly we trade away stability, permanence, and the desire to investigate in favor of increased speed, miniaturization, and the easy, instant access to information. The transient nature of information has been mapped upon the tangible aspects of our lives.

At what point did the world decide that impermanence was better than permanence, that the degradation of our products, disintegration of our literature, dissipation of our history, or the deciduous nature of our art would become desirable, acceptable, reasonable?

Unacceptable!

As things begin to decay, they may create a visual appeal and a scientific interest; but the beauty of natural decay is organic. Its degradation is a creative process developing a new form while retaining aspects of its prior self. Digital decay is destructive. Data is lost, yet its loss is accepted. Should it be abhorred? Should it be tolerated? Is there a place where it should be desired?

What is the difference between signal and noise? What is the difference between data and error? What is image? What is artifact? Which is more valid?

In hindsight, "96, 33-95" attempts to answer these question by presenting forced digital errors as artwork. Those, however, are new questions that arose from original concerns that developed this project.

The media upon which our information is stored have inherent qualities that may cause themselves to degrade, some more quickly than others. The same forces (light, heat, and magnetism) used to place data upon media, be it Zip disk or CD-R, can lead to their destruction.

As software has developed, schemes for translating data that we, as humans, understand into languages that the machine understands have been lost or forgotten. Reverse compatibility of file formats is not always available, but when it is, it can often lead to formatting and display problems.

The library, preservation, and archives communities have begun to wrestle with the issue of digital longevity, as they pit the preservation of materials and information against the increased access that the digital age provides. Research produced for those communities have helped to inform this project.

In attempting to visualize these issues, it was necessary to consider preservation and decay/degradation as terms outside of the realm of digital longevity. Ice was chosen because of its generalized relationship with many forms of preservation, including, but not limited to, food preservation. Melting became the apparent metaphor for degradation and loss of data.

In its final design, this project sought to bring together the abstract interpretations of the issues surrounding digital longevity, an examination of the damage that can be inflicted upon our stored data, and investigate the aesthetics of decay in the digital realm.

In order to examine the physical breakdown of data, the damaging or removal of information from a file was necessary. This was accomplished by altering a UUencoded version of an image file and decoding that file back to a JPEG.

UUencoding is the process of translating binary data into ASCII characters for transmission over the internet. Using a small, widely accepted character set (ASCII characters with values 33-96), strings of ASCII text could be posted in newsgroup messages or e-mailed enabling files to be transferred to other computers. In many cases, UUencoding has been superceded by MIME and Base64 encoding.

UUencoding works as follows: three eight-bit strings are translated into four six-bit strings. These six bit stringsā values are increased by 32 so that they become part of the printable range of ASCII characters. These printable characters are then generally placed in lines of 61 characters, the first character indicating line length. When received and processed through a decoding program, the characters are translated back into binary, recreating the original file.

By changing the characters in the UUencoding, I have essentially damaged or disrupted the file. Specifically for this project, I have disrupted a portion of the JPEG images that controls the organization of the image data provided late in the file.

A grid of 30 images representative of the 1,536 images created throughout the process exhibits various levels of image disruption and data breakdown along the vertical plane and the passage of time across the horizontal plane.

Each successive row follows the same passage of time as the top row - represented by the images (video stills) of ice melting. Mirroring the passage of time and melting of the ice, each row exhibits increased degradation of the image within the same level of image disruption beginning on the left with the least disruption moving to the right with the most. Each successive row demonstrates increased disruption in the display of the image data.

By presenting the disruptions as images in a gallery setting, I allow the viewer to create relationships between the images and the levels of disruption inherent to the process. In addition, I ask the audience to accept these images as any other fine art and to appreciate the aesthetic of digital decay.