Trash CLub

Digital objects may appear minute relative to the physical objects we throw away every day, but they aren’t without palpable heft. Everything digital is stored on physical memory, and when that memory gets full, old, slow, or unstylish, we throw it away. Even digital objects in the cloud live in massive data centers scattered about the earth, and we use a large portion of it to store our trash. We process hundreds, thousands of pieces of media from the web every week, deliberately downloading images or caching streamed audio and video. Those objects pass from the web through our bodies and desktops before ending up trashed or recycled. As they accumulate, what stories do those objects tell? What residue do they leave?

Trash Club is an exquisite corpse of digital garbage made from the trash bins on particpating artists’ computers. First, we uploaded a file from the trash bin on our computer. Then, an artist combined that file with trash from their own computer. Every week a different artist took the file created the previous week and repeated the process. The creations, ranging from poetry to video performances, are featured online at traaaaash.club.

Part of The Wrong Biennale 2019-2020.