“The Erection of a Phygital Graveyard” by Inmi Lee, Yunmi Her

Title:

The Erection of a Phygital Graveyard

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Artist Statement:

The Erection of Phygital Graveyard is an auto-generated real-time animation which speculates the heritage of the phygital environment where the online world and the physical world are intertwined. Updated every hour, the system searches for the most popular keywords online, algorithmically downloads and removes part of the downloaded image which conveys the narrative, leaving only the color information and the rectangular frame. The system automatically arranges the residue of the images creating the digiscape of our collective thoughts of the past and the present.

The space created in The Erection of Phygital Graveyard has no similar world to compare as it prevails for one hour and what seems like an accidental creation is only edited by an algorithm. Created by data which was once edited through removal, the phygital world turns into a cosmic dust.

Instead of it being a mimicry of the physical world, The Erection of Phygital Graveyard reveals the workings of the machines dealing with data and in the process displays how the digital culture is created through the means of re-arranging the visual information. Within this digital ecosystem and culture, where the machine generalizes, classifies and makes decisions, and as we all take part in training a dataset to train the machine, The Erection of Phygital Graveyard speculates the possible heritage and the culture of the digital.