Interactive installation turns selfies into gravel cascades

The Polish collective Pangenerator has created 'hash2ash – everything saved will be lost', an interactive installation commissioned by the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw for the exhibition 'Teen Age'. The work confronts viewers with the fragility of digital data: visitors are invited to take a selfie, but the image immediately disintegrates on screen, with each pixel transformed into a pebble that falls as a noisy gravel cascade below the monitor. The installation is documented in a video that opens with a quote from Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, and former vice president of Google, who warns about the impermanence of digital artifacts. The piece serves as a metaphor for the controversial relationship between bits and atoms and the volatility of digital formats.