Instead of claiming to control events through computational calculation, based on the ever more evolved links between human and artificial intelligence, the daily corruption of a digital image taking place on social media (a manifestation of digital extractive capitalism) humanises digital data by subjecting it to an ageing process. Although it is an anthropocentric gesture, it is driven more by an affective than a cerebral attitude. At work is not the distribution of content, as addressed by Hito Steyerl [1], but the distribution of the sensible, articulated by Rancière: the loss of quality is not transformed into accessibility, but into sensibility.

A kind of ‘anterior’ future, anticipating not only the time when the planet will again become the brain of humanity, defining the way of being in life and death but the time when this will be conceivable, helping to delineate it.

Without practical consequences, the work highlights the fallibility of data in an evolutionary process that tends to erase the image but not the digital essence, like the mystery of life. Exposing oneself to the imponderable of this process demythologises the omnipotence of technology, revealing its vulnerability. Moreover, paradoxically, time passes more quickly for the document than in the real context, indicating how much the former has an ephemeral grip on the latter. That is, how this approach carries with it the promise, albeit hidden, of an accelerated catastrophe.

[1] Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image, 2009, November, e-flux (10), pp. 1-9