Back when I was at college - and very much into my conceptual art - I created a piece of work based on the digital storage of media. The idea was simple: digital media is fragile, inert, and forgettable. If you were to venture up into a loft and find a collection of old dusty books five years from now, you’d most likely immediately open them up to see what they were. If you found a couple of unmarked DVDs in a cardboard box up there, you’d not look twice. Perhaps you’d wonder what might be on them - but it wouldn’t go further than that. Because they’re mass produced and cheap, we don’t place the same kind of value on digital media. Everything is just a back up and nothing is exciting. The piece of art I created based on this was a small white CD rack filled with white CDs in white cases. Each CD contained a large amount of unmarked files, laying bare my entire life and history up until that point as best as I could record it. Every photo, MSN log, email, scanned love letter - all burnt to disc, with no punches pulled. The CD rack was then left in the corner of the computer room in the art college with no explanation, left to be ignored for years to come.

At the time I was convinced that we were adopting our love for digital storage far too quickly - and that the ability to place huge amounts of valuable information onto something so easy to break or lose was foolish. It turned out I was right - and after a few years many people found that the cheap DVDs they’d converted VHS onto had warped and become unusable, the original copies now long discarded. Despite backing up over the years, i’ve somehow still lost a huge amount of data - photos, work, ideas, even a script. It’s so easy to forget about a piece of digital media for years, only to find yourself realising it’s long-lost years later. Most recently, i’ve been stuck by the reality of this on social media:

One of my best friends has recently left Facebook - a fact I realised when trying to find an old photograph he took a few years ago. I couldn’t find the photograph of course, because the album was gone. All the albums were gone. It took a moment to sink in just how many photos of myself I now no longer had access to. Sure, i’m always aware of the fact that I can save other people’s photos from Facebook onto my computer so I have a hard copy - but it’s something I’ll likely never get around to doing. Worse than saving valuable memories of our lives onto dodgy bits of plastic that are liable to bend and break, in the age of social networking we’re happy to let others around us host our memories - the modern equivalent of keeping your photo albums in someone else’s loft.

So if you’ve been using Facebook over the past few years of your life you’ve likely collected hundreds of photographs of yourself with friends too - but in ten years time, how many of these will you actually own?