Digital Waste
Digital Waste
A conceptual illustration commissioned by Noema Magazine for the article 'Reducing the Waste From Our Digital Lives' by Steven Weber, Ann Cleaveland, Sekhar Sarukkai, and Sundar Sarukkai. I wanted to approach the idea of digital waste not only symbolically but literally. A digital artwork is ultimately just data, and once its artistic value is stripped away, what remains is an image occupying a measurable amount of space in the digital environment. I wanted this reality to be part of the work itself, which meant taking control of the exact amount of data the final image would contain.
At the center of the illustration, horizontal and vertical lines merge on a dotted surface to spell out the statement: “THIS IMAGE ADDS 1380512 BYTES TO DIGITAL WASTE.” The design suggests a stylized circuit board, wiring, or a data block on a network. And if you download the original file and check its properties, you’ll see that it is indeed exactly 1,380,512 bytes — the same amount of space it occupies on Noema’s server.
Achieving this was its own challenge. The process expanded from designing an image to controlling its data footprint at the smallest possible level. Creating a work with an exact size in bytes required trial and error: understanding how the JPEG compression algorithm interprets information on the XY plane, adjusting shapes and letterforms, and eventually changing pixels one by one. It took more than 200 exports to make the file size match the number stated in the illustration.
In the end, the drawing affected the file size, and the file size affected the drawing. That tension became a performative way of engaging with digital waste and data control — something I would never have confronted while creating a still image under normal circumstances. And ultimately, this artwork remains exactly what it declares itself to be: 1,380,512 bytes of digital waste.