Soft Data: Photography, Memory, and Material Decay

Author: Gábor Dóka
Field: Artistic Research / Photography
Keywords: digital remains, surveillance, material memory, gelatin, decay, posthuman archive, soft data

Abstract

This artistic research explores the intersection of photography, surveillance, and material decay. It traces how images transition from tools of representation to agents of power, memory, and entropy. Building on Carl Öhman’s notion of digital remains and Rosemary Lee’s idea of algorithmic materiality, the project rethinks the photographic image as both mortal and processual. Through the organic medium of gelatin, derived from animal collagen-to digital traces such as images, metadata, and QR codes are embedded into perishable matter. These soft archives act as temporary fossils that blur, melt, and dissolve over time.

By documenting this transformation processes, the work visualizes data loss not as disappearance but as a form of remembering through disintegration. In this sense, Soft Data proposes decay as a critical aesthetic: an ethics of impermanence within the posthuman archive.

Research Context and Questions

This project continues a research trajectory that began with Mass Surveillance & Image Power—an earlier phase exploring algorithmic vision through the works of Matteo Pasquinelli, Harun Farocki, and Trevor Paglen. Where those inquiries examined how images operate as instruments of control, Soft Data turns toward the afterlife of images: their decay, disappearance, and transformation after human presence fades.

Core research questions include:

The project is situated within a conceptual network including Carl Öhman (digital afterlife), Rosemary Lee (algorithmic image), and Joanna Zylinska (nonhuman photography). It approaches data not as immaterial information but as embodied matter unstable, energetic, and mortal.

Ethical Dimensions: The Politics of Digital Remains

The project also addresses the ethical and philosophical uncertainties surrounding the storage and reuse of posthumous data. Following Carl Öhman’s argument in The Moral Meaning of Digital Remains (2023), the digital traces left behind by the dead cannot be treated as neutral information. They are *posthumous extensions of personhood, data that continue to represent, perform, and even “speak” for their original subjects.

As corporations and AI developers increasingly incorporate publicly available online data into generative models, the boundaries between memory, identity, and exploitation become blurred. If an AI system is trained on the images, texts, and voices of the deceased, who- if anyone owns that reconstructed presence? Can a digital model derived from a dead person’s data be considered a form of continuation, or does it constitute a violation- a form of posthumous colonization of the self?

Öhman suggests that digital remains demand a new kind of ethics: one that respects the dignity of the dead as digital subjects. The persistence of data after death transforms mourning into a political act where deletion, preservation, or algorithmic reuse each carry moral weight. In this context, Soft Data becomes both a conceptual and ethical experiment: by allowing data to decay organically, it symbolically resists the commodification and eternal circulation of the dead in algorithmic systems.

Additional ethical considerations include:

Methodology / Artistic Process

  1. Material Translation
    Gelatin functions as both photographic emulsion and sculptural substrate. Fragments of digital information: binary code, images, are printed or embedded within gelatin sheets. The organic material reacts visibly to humidity, temperature, and microbial life, transforming over time.
  2. Observation of Decay
    As gelatin decomposes, embedded data becomes unreadable. This makes the invisible visible- translating data loss into physical form. It mirrors the silent degradation of digital infrastructures and storage systems.
  3. Documentation / Recursive Archiving
    Each stage of decay is documented through photography and/or video. These records create recursive archives: memory loops that document both presence and disappearance.
  4. Installation Plan
    The possible/ undecided form of the works, would be the gelatin objects, still photographs, are presented as ephemeral archives. Sound recordings of melting, cooling, or electronic hums may accompany them. Each piece is a memory-machine that records and forgets simultaneously.

Artistic Reflection

Soft Data reimagines photography as an entropic medium, a system in which every image is already dissolving. Rather than resisting decay, it embraces it as integral to the ontology of the image. Gelatin becomes a biological data centre, a living archive that mirrors the instability of digital storage.

By connecting biological memory (bone, collagen) with digital memory (silicon, SSD), the project reveals that matter itself remembers. The body and the server are both energy-dependent fossils. When power ceases, both decay.

Drawing on Rosemary Lee’s “machine-image” theory, the gelatin object can be seen as an algorithmic fossil, a material system that stores, transforms, and erases. It questions the fantasy of eternal storage and reframes decay as a method of knowledge: to remember through transformation rather than through permanence.

Relation to Previous Research

This phase extends from earlier projects on Mass Surveillance and Digital Afterlife. Where Farocki’s operational images exposed the politics of seeing, and Paglen revealed hidden infrastructures, Soft Data addresses images that die- systems that decompose and disappear. It bridges the operational image of the living with the mortal image of the posthumous archive.

In this continuum, gelatin serves as a posthuman skin: data becomes flesh, and flesh becomes data. Through decomposition, photography reclaims its mortality and material presence.

Bibliography / References