digital arson: the installation

nobody grieves a statistic.

data loss gets explained, never felt. the brief: make it personal, live, and final. you bring your own files.

the library of alexandria did not burn in a day. it rotted.

the cloud is the same fantasy, degrading in slow, ambient ways. the scribe is now the interface, and in a feed of infinite copies nothing keeps its aura.

your files arrive one by one.

icons slide in 80 ms apart, like a directory being read. each is a real thumbnail. open one and the icon is gone: it moves, it does not copy.

real failure, not a filter.

17 corruption behaviours built from real broken jpegs and bit rot. no two files rot the same way.

it tries to save itself. it loses.

repair comes in waves, strong early, weak late, gone in the last tenth.

every control works.

draw, erase, filter, play, minimize. hidden is not safe: a minimized file keeps rotting in the dock.

the pictures leave their frames.

windows are eaten from the outside in. the audio dies with the screen. the cursor goes.

restart, or power off.

both roads end in absence. one makes you look at it.

make it like this.

the method, not the medium.

you can make the death real.

the piece runs two ways. in the browser it shows your files dying, but a browser cannot touch your disk, so your originals are safe. the desktop version carries an optional backend: arm it, and when a file burns the real file leaves your computer and does not come back. destruction as a choice you have to make on purpose.