Bringing Impermanence To The Digital World

An entire generation is emerging that may know nothing but cloud computing, and we’re increasingly becoming accustomed to a world where all data on the internet will last forever.

Temporary.cc explores the idea of how impermanence can be surprisingly meaningful in this context; with each unique visitor, the site destroys a part of itself and will eventually become a blank white page. The idea is that the site constantly exists in a state where it cannot be archived or experienced in its current form except in the very moment.

Creator Zach Gage explains the project:

Virtual data isn’t subject to decay like traditional media. Despite this, we can still lose personal data to disk failure, viruses, or accidental deletion. Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.

Temporary.cc eschews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.

Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.

Temporary.cc from zach gage on Vimeo.
[via CreativeApplications.Net]