That's file · by Ivan Dal Cin

One day my father brought me a memory card from his camera, saying that the images on it had disappeared and asking me to try to recover them. I installed a recovery program on my PC, but in the file previews there were only fragmented images. They were like geometric patchworks, where each image was composed of slices of multiple photographs. I started taking screenshots of everything I found, and the further I went the more the combinatorial complexity seemed to increase. Finally, I also copied some intact photographs - a minority fraction out of around 900 images.

Forgoing further investigations, I decided to use the material for a project on the non-linear and discontinuous nature of digital space (or memory?). I remember the defragmentation procedure that was used to keep the hard disk clean: this random decomposition and assembly of image slices is in itself already an anarchive, with its own logic that is obscure to me, which has produced incredible visual and semantic interweavings. Who am I to refuse such a wonderfully uncanny gift?