Data being
Data Being is an evolving series of mixed media sculptures that imagine entities formed from the digital residues of lived experience across distinct phases of digital culture. These works begin with abandoned files—images, audio, and other fragments—found on second-hand or discarded electronic devices. Through processes of obscuring, fragmentation, and recomposition, the material is abstracted beyond perceptual familiarity, severed from its prior context, and reconfigured into ambiguous forms of presence.
Each sculpture is conceived as a singular “being” whose existence is shaped by both the technological system that once stored its source material and the physical assemblage that now houses it. Everyday objects, obsolete hardware, and altered digital remnants converge into hybrid forms—part machine, part memory, part speculative organism—embodying the tensions between decay and renewal, intimacy and estrangement.
Data Being reflects on the shifting conditions of privacy, identity, and intimacy in an era where personal traces are endlessly collected, repurposed, and fed into artificial intelligence systems. The project raises questions about the security of thought, the persistence of data beyond its intended use, and the potential horizons of consciousness within the infrastructures we have built.
Positioned between the realities of contemporary data surveillance and the speculative horizons of a post-digital future, these works invite viewers to encounter unstable, unclassifiable lifeforms that arise when human memory becomes both a material and a medium.
Works in the Data being Series
Data Being #1 (2024), interior view showing monitor and dismantled computer parts housed in garbage can.