A Bit in the Abyss

The lot at Eagle Leasing. Photo by Sarah Newman

As the metaLAB team arrived in Oxford, Massachusetts at Eagle Leasing, a tidy inventory of shipping containers greeted us. One is destined to be the home of an immersive, multi-sensory experience we are crafting for the upcoming ILLUMINUS Boston, a nighttime festival to take place on Landsdowne Street the weekend of October 3rd as part of HUBweek.

The staff was incredibly helpful. GIF by Cristoforo Magliozzi

Our entry in the festival asks what information looks like when it reaches towards infinity with knowledge, memory, and data stored in ever-larger aggregates of servers. The project is inspired by the Internet Archive, which hosts Open Library, the Wayback Machine, and several other digital-archiving projects; together, they seek nothing less than to digitize and treasure up all the world’s knowledge. It is a theme familiar to metaLAB with a number of projects, such as the Cold Storage interactive documentary, engaging archives and storage systems.

Our shipping container, the smallest available, is roughly a 10-foot cube. Photo by Marshall Lambert.

In first contact with our staging, the team was struck by the sensory experience a shipping container creates when shuttered. The resulting disorientation and discomfort evoked accounts of human trafficking and ongoing migrant crises around the globe. We decided we would like to engage these thoughts further, but with the time limitations of this particular piece, we are sticking to the initial themes we set out to convey.

Even with doors wide-open, a shipping container is not the brightest of places to inhabit. Photo by Marshall Lambert.

Through representation of a “Petabox” — the digital storage server designed by the Internet Archive for the networked curation of digital data, the use of extended mirrored walls to transcend the shipping containers confined quarters, and a data-expressive use of lights and sound, the piece will require a combination of physical and digital fabrication to realize our vision. It is a vision which at its core, makes use of the “Droste Effect,” which occurs when images are reflected among multiple mirrors to create the impression of an infinite series. The effect is also called mise-en-abyme, a French phrase, which translates as “to place in the abyss.” The phrase evokes the existential condition of information storage: as we digitize recorded knowledge, it falls into a virtual abyss of abstraction.

Some notable precedents in mirrored exhibition:

Unlimited Urban Woods in Amsterdam.

Lucas Samaras 1966 Mirrored Room. Images from Twistedsifter.com

Infinity Cube by Microsoft

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has done a number of infinity-room-based pieces, including this one, entitled Fireflies on the Water in 2002.

A early metaLAB mock-up of a server in a mirror room.

The team mise en scéne for “A Bit in the Abyss” Photo by Sarah Newman.