The photo series Crashed Memories Twenty-Eleven (2023) is due to a lucky accident. In 2011, after the upheavals of the so-called Arab Spring, we traveled to different places in Tunisia. At this time, police forces were mainly absent, and we got intrigued to learn how civil society would establish order without any institution that gained power through the monopoly of physical violence.
It was a chaotic time, yet the society was working quite well. “No traffic lights, no jams” was one of our earliest observations. As no one would maintain order, the people in Tunisia seemed to realize that chaos wasn’t the worst thing to happen. At this time, everyone dared to show up as they wanted.
We traveled a lot and documented the time through film and digital media. While the old analog film did not let us do it, the digital images did. They were stored only on a hard disk that got physically damaged. For more than ten years, we had no access to the photos until we found an agency in Kyiv that could recover our data at affordable costs.
While most of the data was successfully recovered, one folder attracted our attention. The folder’s name was “¡Problem_46640.” It contained damaged files that lost the INIT data. No image viewer could open these damaged image files in 2021.
However, progress does not sleep. Thanks to new advancements in machine learning, it became possible to rearrange the pixel order and reveal how physical damage affected the signal chain. We were surprised by how perfectly the accident composed the images. The digital disorder transposed the color channels onto different layers, producing dramatically overexposed areas. The pictures were randomly sliced into pieces, yet they simultaneously appeared radically composed.
The result is a series of digital photo prints that uncover the data structure we are used to seeing as a digital image.
