Thom Jeffrey Garcia
HWILSDON: An Experimental Preservation Practice Visualizing Data as Code, Object, and Architecture
Other
2020
Various
HWILSDON is a practice-led research project intent on communicating “a life.” The original owner of a USB flash storage drive titled “HWILSDON” who left it at a Rapid Prototyping Facility. The longevity of data is increasingly compromised by what several data scientists and researchers describe as an informational black hole and an era of unrestrained permanent data deletion designated the “digital Dark Age.” Consensus amongst data preservation experts is to copy our digital content into as many different media formats as possible and hope that some survive.
“As a tripartite project, HWILSDON experiments with speculative preservation practices. This includes translating data into the Relic – a bespoke code, the Reliquary - data visualization materialized as a fabricated object, and the Reliquarium – an architectural typology for commemorating data.”