Developing visual methodologies that care for Image Waste & Digital Debris

It is well known that globally we produce a huge amount of physical garbage but the fact that we also generate an enormous quantity of digital image debris is discussed much less. Every day millions of photographic images are produced, shared, ignored, discarded, and forgotten. Many of these images — along with their embedded metadata — end up in the cloud, where image optimisation scripts and algorithms create even greater number of copies, cropping and processing information such as faces, buildings and addresses through machine learning. All this hidden data synchronises and bounces between devices and servers across unknown geographies, accumulating increasingly more detailed patterns of human behaviour.

For the exhibition You Shall Be Spam✶ third-year graphic design students from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague developed novel methods, formats, and narratives by researching, re-using, and transforming their own image waste and digital debris into critical reflections.

Check out all the projects on the website:

youshallbespam.net

You shall be Spam is an initiative of IMD and Image class at the Bachelor Graphic Design guided by tutors Hannes Bernard and Katrin Korfmann , who are current members of the KABK Design and the Deep Future research group.

✶ Exhibition title borrowed from Hito Steyerl's essay Digital Debris.