Hash2Ash

„Interactive installation that turns selfies into pile of ash, created for National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw as a part of TEEN AGE exhibition.

“We don’t want our digital lives to fade away.
If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital
objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future”

– Vint Cerf, former vice president of Google

Installation touches on the themes of selfie-culture, and the fear of permanently losing the digital records of our lives due to technical failures, impermanence of data storage, or simply because of the obsolescence of the old digital file formats. Even with such compulsive overproduction of the images of ourselves we might end up with nothing but the blank memories of our past. Even the data on ourselves will eventually fade away…

The installation consist of the display that prompts you to take a selfie on your phone, which it renders in digital particles on its large 1×1 meter screen. Then a moment later, your face scatters and falls apart and the real black gravel starts to fall at the bottom of the screen in perfect synchrony with the digital simulation. Gradually a dark mound builds up at the foot of the construction”. (https://pangenerator.com/projects/hash2ash/)

Curators of the project: Anna Grunwald, Beata Kuracińska
Designers of Installation: panGenerator Group (Jakub Koźniewski, Krzysztof Goliński, Piotr Barszczewski i Krzysztof Cybulski), www.pangenerator.com, PanGenerator

Project team – Greece’ 2018: Anna Grunwald, Marta Czerska, Justyna Dominiak, Angelika Dziurawiec, Anahita Rezaei, Mariusz Pieńkowski, Mariusz Horoś

Project realized by the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw in partnership with the Athens Digital Festival in Greece in 2018 thanks to funding from Mazowieckie Voivodeship Self-government.