MICHAEL MCDERMOTT: UNDELETED
/November 5 - March 25, 2022
Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery, Fairfax Campus
Events
CLOSING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, MARCH 24 @ 6 - 8pm (IN-PERSON)
No RSVP necessary. Refreshments will be provided.
Exhibition Overview:
When is the last time you thought about one of your old phones? Thought about where it might be? About what was on it? The volume of information stored on it? The texts, pictures, and histories that could still be lingering? Have you thought about the pictures, videos, and texts that you sent that could still exist somewhere out of your control?
Undeleted looks for those phones and that data and presents a curated sample of what was found. Each set of prints provides a voyeuristic portrait of the previous owner while inviting the viewer to question whether that previous owner is them.
Two types of data are displayed on the wall. The first is intact files that remained on the phone, information that would be accessible by using the phone. The second is data that was deleted. This type of data was thought to be erased but was merely marked for deletion, waiting to be overwritten by another file and often incomplete and fragmented.
Each portrait displays both kinds of data, intact and deleted, and varies depending on the phone and what was able to be extracted. The prints on the wall are only a tiny fraction of the extracted data. As an example, these seven phones held a total of 221,074 images and 30,958 texts.
So ask yourself again, where are your old phones? Is one of them here?
About the Designer:
Michael McDermott is a designer, educator, and researcher who is interested in the relationship between people and the objects they leave behind. He received his MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and his Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech. He is currently an Assistant Professor at George Mason University.
