CRASHED PORTFOLIOS
The CRASHED portfolio came about in the most painful of ways, when a hard drive full of digital photographs crashed. The crash was literally the click of death: click, click, click, click …. click again. Full of hope, I sent the hard drive to a data recovery agency. When they told me they could not reclaim a single piece of data and were going to throw the drive away, I protested and implored them to send the drive back to me anyway. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I went out and bought some data recovery software, managing to recapture around 200 gigabytes. Only a fraction of the images were fully recovered, leaving the rest unreadable. There was simply no way the computer could read these incomplete, truncated files. Unable to give up, I wrote a script to copy the images to a new drive, thereby re-writing the image code. That worked to correct a small batch of these images, the ones with tight horizontal lines at the bottom, giving everything a very #glitch art feel, yet not. So I tried yet another script to combine l similar into a single, compressed image. For those images simply refusing to not be truncated, yet a third script was used to assign a complimentary color to the broken parts. Yet no matter what was tried, some color blocks were only visible in the preview section and would then disappear as soon as I opened the files. In order to reserve those unique color blocks, I went for a final fourth script to copy over the rescued files and save them as tiff files...and in doing so those became the images you are now viewing today.
Time is both compressed and abstracted within each image.
Each image has been reclaimed from the digital abyss and, in doing so...a new work was created
