Artist Talk: Evan Meany – Group C

In his talk, Evan Meaney gave insight into his current art works and projects that deal with new media forms being exposed to the aspect of decay. Meany sports a strong vision and enthusiasm about the volatility of not only art and media, but also of data in general and eventually of life itself. He bases his work around themes like death, finiteness and the dealing with such. One of the main topics hereby is the loss of information – or rather the fear of losing information.

A very interesting aspect of Meaney’s talk was the revision of an allegedly common belief in digital technology’s superiority to physical preservation techniques; so far, nothing is safe from decay and not even digital technology is capable of avoiding this process. One of the main reasons for this is the occurrence of so-called glitches: disruptions in a digital code that causes the output to distort.

The aim in one of his latest projects is the countering of this process through the collection, fragmentation and preservation of data in a massive data container. The consequence of this process however is the permanent inaccessibility of the data.

On a philosophical level, it could be interesting to question the necessity of the preservation of any data to begin with. Why and when would it be important to preserve something, especially if nothing and no one is going to last – and especially if this information becomes inaccessible forever? In that sense, what does it really mean to preserve something? And is that price too high to pay?

Further, Meaney suggests a connection between glitches and the idea of ghosts.

“For the most part, a ghost and a glitch develop from a similar ephemeral root; meaning that we don't expect either of them, and once engaged, they quickly disappear.”

Gloria!
Hollis Frampton, 1979

He draws out this connection in his short film/ game project ‘The Ceibas Cycle’. Here, the main character dies in the beginning of the plot, resurrects as a ghost and eventually enters the after-life. A digital glitch is placed in that same moment of the scenario, which expands the experience of death and decay to another dimension: It is no longer an event within the predictable and limited frame of a game plot, but affects aspect like the system’s functionality, time and space beyond the borders of the film.

The Ceibas Cycle: Epilogue
Evan Meaney, 2011

By generating it on purpose, Meaney plays with the aspect of glitches as an art form. He changes the original code, re-imagines the original memory and artificially generates the result of a decaying process before the actual process. Consequently, wouldn’t that mean that the “destruction” of something old is the creation of something new? Wouldn’t that mean that the process of decaying, the altering of information and memory, and the supposed loss of the old, is actually a form of rebirth? Like ghosts, an altered form of a human, entering a new life and world? But can something decay and be reborn forever, without being completely gone at some point?