I don’t want to forget a paper
ARTIST
Shu Cheng Tsao
ARTFORM
Embossed paper
SIZE
1060 x 780 mm
MATERIAL
Paper, adjusted printing press, acrylic sheet, laser cutter, a spotlight with framing shutters for analog light mapping onto paper.
TOPIC
Digital memory seems to have affected the most complete exchange between materiality and time. It appears eternal and limitless, yet is at the same time profoundly fragile.
By compressing all information into code, we gradually immerse ourselves in a reductive mode of remembering, while forgetting the vast and complex material and energetic systems on which it depends. In this process, we lose the weight of material records, as if living in a landfill of unlived lives. I fear that one day, we may even forget paper, one of the earliest material supports of memory. When that day comes, we may no longer be able to understand a digital image that once depicted or recorded on paper, and we will have forgotten that memory once had weight.
In this work, I convert a digital image of a blank sheet of paper into Base64, a common text-encoding method that translates binary data (0s and 1s) into a readable set of 64 characters, and emboss it onto the paper itself. The result is precise and legible, yet fragile and obscure, as we cannot mentally reconstruct the image from the code alone. Instead, we are left to let the paper slowly return to a state close to its original form.
CREDITS
Thanks to Asli Serbest, Judith Lena Bartels, Markus Walthert, Yasmin Bianca Kobori Belck for supporting this project.
