Zoom / Resolution / Server-side Decay was an installation commissioned by Design Museum Gent and on display between April 16th and June 16th 2024. It consists of a small custom computer, 4 screens that display a website that continuously updates, a painted network switch, and laced Ethernet cables.

In 2024, the Design Museum Gent was in the middle of building an extension to the museum, and the bricks for this new building were produced in an eco-friendly way in a warehouse on the outskirts of Gent. In order to activate that location, the museum organized a public program there throughout spring 2024.

The installation bridges the gap between these two locations, the brick production site and the Museum. It invites visitors to reflect on the invisible infrastructures that are required to maintain online connections: As video streaming and conferencing is becoming increasingly high-res and low-latency, and our camera rolls fill up with hoarded images that we never look at again, it’s an invitation for visitors to reflect on the the infrastructures required to maintain a sense of connection.

At the brick production site, a small, mobile computer equipped with a camera takes a picture once a minute. Visitors are invited to move it around, choosing what gets captured and documented. The resulting photographs are displayed on a small, dedicated website, which is on display on the four screens in the vitrine of the museum. Like bricks in a wall, bit by bit, they make up a visual timeline of events—essentially a live stream with a very low frame rate.

In order to reduce digital clutter, the images decrease in size over time. Each new image starts at full resolution, and with each step gets scaled down. As we slowly but steadily zoom out, the images get demoted from frames to thumbnails, and then to individual pixels. In the end, as the resolution shifts from time (1440 minute / day) to space (1440 pixels / line), a new image is manufactured from these smallest building blocks. A sprite, almost entirely noise, but not quite—an echo, not an archive.