9/11/2017 0 Comments what do i think?The question “As you begin this new part of your life, what are you leaving behind?” struck me as particularly interesting. The “new part of your life” suggested college, but college is more of a continuation of prior academics. It could also mean living on your own, or leaving your hometown. However, I took it to mean something bigger than all of these- the unknown. All the way through high school, and even before, there was a clear goal: college. I always knew that this was the next step. However, now there is no next step, at least not yet. What is being left behind is the knowledge of the future. There is something more personal being left behind as well. That is my own views and beliefs, which are constantly changing. I fully expect to leave college with a different philosophy, and I wanted to capture this. When brainstorming for this project I became stuck on the idea of an object. What object could I possibly make that would encompass all of the changing views and unknown future that I have? I arrived at an idea. I began by creating a text file on my computer. Over the course of three days, I developed a large collection of my current set of beliefs, motivations, observations, and personal philosophy. I then began removing extra sentences and words to try and reveal the core ideas that I was trying to convey. In the end, I reduced a few thousand words into a few hundred. The text file contained a representation of who I am now and how I think. Finally, at 12:00 AM on Sept. 11, I performed a seven pass erase; essentially burying the digital data under seven layers of random ones and zeros. The data is never really gone, only buried and impossible to recover. The file effectively no longer exists, save for the documentation of the process. For a brief few days, there existed one place, outside of myself that contained a reflection of my views. That place is now gone. In a few weeks, months, or years, my views will have changed, and it is likely I will not remember how I used to think. Buried under seven layers of random data, this text file will still exist, completely inaccessible.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|