Year
2015
Tag
Installations
A grain of sand is small enough to disappear into a surface. Gather enough grains and the surface becomes a volume. At that point, a quantity begins to make a different demand on the eye.
Yotta used sand to approach the scale of digital information. Created for Mapping Knowledge at the Mundaneum, the installation compared three moments in an account of the digital universe: a historical estimate, a contemporary estimate and a projection of what was still to come.
2015 · Mapping Knowledge · Mundaneum Museum, Mons · Art & Research / Installations.
Finding a scale for the invisible
The vocabulary of digital storage grows quickly beyond ordinary experience. A large number can be read aloud without becoming easier to imagine. Yotta translated those quantities into physical volumes, giving the comparison a place in the museum.
The visitor could move between the displays and examine their relative scale. Sand offered a material with a useful tension: an individual unit could be imagined, while a mass of units resisted counting. The work used that distance between a grain and an accumulation to make magnitude perceptible.
Visitors examine the display at the Mundaneum.
A display surface, sand and an interpretive label.
A future viewed from 2015
The installation’s account of growth was expressed through three values: 0.005 zettabytes for an estimate associated with the period up to 2003; 4.4 zettabytes for the contemporary digital universe; and a projection of 44 zettabytes by 2020. These were the figures through which the installation framed growth.
They belong to the work’s historical context. The final value was a forecast, not an observation from the future. Seen now, the installation also records how expansion was imagined at the time: through a comparison whose largest volume had not yet become a measured present.
Detail of the material used to represent an accumulation of data.
Knowledge and its containers
The Mundaneum offered a setting in which the arrangement of knowledge was already a subject. Yotta approached that subject through quantity, asking how a culture pictures the information it produces and keeps.
The sand made the comparison tangible without explaining the contents of the data. That absence remained part of the work. More information has a measurable scale, but scale alone cannot tell us what is worth remembering, what is repeated, or what will still be meaningful when the container grows.
How it was made
Measured quantities of sand represented the relative volumes associated with three historical data estimates and projections. Display surfaces, containers and interpretive graphics allowed visitors to compare those quantities physically.
Explanatory reconstruction based on the project archive. The drawing shows the installation and visitor interaction; it is not a fabrication plan.
References
- Original DDS case study — Original project description and photographic record.
- DDS exhibition and events archive — Dated event listing.
A project by Domestic Data Streamers. Images selected from the original project and exhibition archives.
