I shot this picture yesterday - I think a beautiful example of 'degrading gracefully.' This is a notion that Eno poses in the Time and Bits Seminar, which was hosted at the Getty Foundation a few years ago. I have a tremendous amount of anxiety about the longevity of digital prints in a general sense, but also a particular anxiety about the way they will transform over time. I've noticed that printed materials left in the sun tend to degrade such that the inks don't fade at equal rates. Now that's better than electronic data: a sigle bit lost could mean that the file can't be reconstructed.

Perhaps the way to design works is such that they are meant to be ported across materials and media, that the process of porting is integral to the piece. So one instance of an image might be in stone - it will survive a nuclear blast, but because of it's mass it can't be 'evacuated' with it's population. But another instance might be on paper - more fragile, but many copies can be transported easily and don't require any specific high tech. And finally, a digital version which can be stored on many redundant servers in disparate locations, such that if there is a failure at one location, it can be restored from other distrubuted copies [also usefull for error correction in case of bit rot.]

What images merit this treatment? What images beg to be incarnate in many forms?