engraved glass, adhesive film / february 2025
The original panorama of a digitally explorable landscape in the game ActiveWorlds has been deleted. The hosting costs of the now-abandoned worlds are too high to keep them running. They are not being preserved.
The work ASCII Archaeology translates the last fragments of the world into ASCII code and thus into a compressed form. The image is first converted to grayscale, then each point is assigned an ASCII character based on its brightness. Through the transfer to analogue material, specifically glass, one of the most enduring materials available, the compression gains a longevity that is not available in digital storage media.
