Digital data has a paradoxical status. Immaterial by definition, it nonetheless has a need for a physical substance (hardware) to manifest itself. Eternal and not subject to decay, it is forced to bond its life to the hosting support, inheriting fragility and a tendency to degenerate. Furthermore, data legibility is
continuously put at risk by the growing obsolescence of machines and software.
This complex relationship between matter and code has fascinated artists since the sixties, when conceptualists spotted in the developing computer languages a possible metaphor for art itself (materials as hardware and ideas as software), as well as a new platform for experimenting with processuality in art.
