nothing’s lost in numbers
(2019)

a project by felix gärtner and Romano Dudas


We’ve sold off our old smartphone, those confidential documents are gathering dust in the cloud somewhere, and we forgot the login info for that abandoned Facebook account a long time ago. How much do we care about managing our digital footprint anymore? Are we still able to cover our tracks on the Internet, or will part of us live on forever on the servers in Silicon Valley?

We “save” digital information on a storage medium by stringing together a sequence of ones and zeroes combined in various ways. Removing information from a storage medium means completely overwriting these strings of digits with new combinations. But when we “delete” data, we’re simply removing that entry from the directory and freeing up that storage space to be used again. From then on, the information can no longer be accessed, but it still exists somewhere in the background.

The exhibition “Nothing’s Lost in Numbers” features pieces drawn from 31 used memory cards purchased on eBay from sellers all over the world. felix gärtner and Romano Dudas used an ordinary data recovery program on these supposedly empty memory cards to restore the material now on display. These files offer a voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of others, revealing things that were not originally intended for the viewer’s eyes.

The combined effect of the various photographs, videos, and PDF documents – some of it mundane, some of it quite odd – opens up new contexts. The pieces on display show nothing more than the realities of other people’s lives, but they’re unlike anything that we’re used to seeing in this age of social media dominated by manipulated images.

While the provenance of the images on display may seem somewhat questionable, neither the purchase of used storage media (including laptops and smartphones) nor the use of freely available recovery software is illegal. It takes very little in terms of money or fancy technology for the average person to uncover even the most sensitive data. “Nothing’s Lost in Numbers” questions whether the act of deleting has any meaning in the digital realm, or if it’s even possible, challenging our awareness when it comes to our own data security.