Disk Full
Glassell Gallery
Baton Rouge
Through October. 19
How many unread emails do you have? When I started writing this, I had 47 — mostly from today — and by the time I finish, I’ll probably have more. I treat it as a to-do list. When I get overwhelmed, I take comfort in the fact that other people’s inboxes look worse. For example, in “Disk Full,” an art collaboration between Christine Bruening and Janna Ahrndt, a piece which visualizes emails in Ahrndt’s inbox, it says they have 1274 unread emails.
“Disk Full” is on display at the Glassel Gallery with a free public reception and Q&A on Friday, Sept. 19 and various community heirloom scanning and printing hours through the first week of October. The show confronts the digital archives that are taken for granted as part of contemporary life. More than that, it makes this ordinary thing feel like something strange and a little absurd.
When I was little, we had a tape recorder that we made home videos on and photo albums that each housed distinct eras of memory. After my mom gave up on those mediums, we got an external hard drive on which we backed everything up. Maybe it’s because of some nostalgia for that time that I purchased my own photo album and external hard drive. Even with all that equipment, I mostly just look things up on Instagram or Facebook if I need something. That’s where most of my files functionally live.
“What does it mean that your familial heirlooms are owned by someone else?” Ahrndt asked in a public lecture about their work on Wednesday.
We have so many things digitized, they pointed out. We have PDF scans of books we’ll never read, 11 copies of the same photo that — let's be real — we will not go back and sort through, junk emails never deleted, old school assignments and browser histories containing the hundreds of tabs we have open at any given time. What happens to all of our digital assets when we die? Who decides if they’re worth saving? Do people get to truly die if their digital footprints echo forever?
“Disk Full” is a jumping off point for these questions. But there are no easy answers.
So much of our world is online, it feels impossible to opt out. If one is proactive, they can archive their own data in a personal server, as Ahrndt plans to teach people to do Thursday, or back things up, but that doesn’t do anything to change the way that technology and digital spaces have permeated our lives.
Despite all this, the piece visually representing Ahrndt’s emails feels like it ironically forces one out of the digital world, even if only to reflect about it. The piece is paired with a fan that displays a representation of a hot pink 3D printed version of a cat, one of Bruening’s family heirlooms. Both elements of the show don’t translate over photo or video. The cat is only rendered in two fan blades' worth of image at a time. The email piece takes on a rainbow color filter which also changes.
We might not be able to escape our digital fates or fully understand where our technology is taking us. But we can make things worth seeing in real life in the meantime, full email inbox or not.
