What Four Months of Cleared Internet Cache Looks Like As a Physical Object

‘Cleared Cache’, Compressed laser print, 9cm x 22cm x 5cm, Courtesy XPO Gallery

This article originally appeared on Motherboard. Evan Roth bills himself as a hacker-artist. And, like all digital natives, he's a product of the internet age. Using his hacker ethos, Roth has “hacked” the TSA, Justin Bieber fans, and TED Talks. His most recent exhibition, ‘View In Room’, just wrapped up its run at Paris’s XPO Gallery. Roth shot a video of himself making Internet Cache Self-Portrait, in which he “cleared” four months worth of internet cache in physical form. To see that much internet cache visualized as art is one thing, but the real genius was not in the presentation of that accumulated data, but in thinking about its disposal. This physical deletion, to my mind, is Roth’s most interesting representation of the Internet age. Brower data is disposable; something to be purged for all sorts of reasons (faster computing, the concealment of impulses we deem shameful), but is it ever truly erased? As we all know after the Snowden leaks, our Google and Facebook data finds its way into the hands of advertisers, but is also stored and analyzed by the NSA. It goes on living—endlessly perhaps. So does Roth’s internet cache work, which I think should not be bought, but find its way into the trash, where it will have several other lives, before being either recycled or exposed to the disintegrating power of the elements. The recycling of Roth’s internet cache is interesting in and of itself. In this scenario, it could be taken, processed, and fashioned into other paper products. In other words, resurrected; something that’s foreign to digital data, which can never really become anything but what it was when created, unless it’s corrupted somehow with a virus. It doesn’t seem that Roth was commenting on data being mined, sold, and analyzed by various private and state interests. After all, he was creating this art between May and June of 2013. But, after the Snowden leaks, you can’t help but read an anti-NSA commentary into the work, which is the beauty of art.