A quiet desert failure, 2015
Algorithmic performance, Website, Tumblr archive
A quiet desert failure, 2015
A quiet desert failure is an ongoing, online real-time, algorithmic performance by Guido Segni started in 2013 and was publicly presented 2015 in the context of The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale.
In its own way, it’s a monumental piece about internet contents, emptiness, time, storage, memory, oblivion and - ultimately - failure.
The artist programmed an Internet bot, a program that simulates a human activity, to traverse the data-scape of Google Maps in order to fill a Tumblr blog and its datacenters with a remapped representation of the whole Sahara Desert, one post a time, every 30 minutes.
The project is part of Data fillings, a series of conceptual web-based works exploring the idea of filling both the surface and the physical references (the data centers) of the Internet with (apparently?) worthless information.
The whole performance will approximately take 50 years to be completed, but it is still not clear if the audience, the Google’s servers, the Tumblr archive or the Internet itself will last enough to see the end.
So, be patient, don’t hurry... The desert is coming.
