Scale We Live In

The seemingly pervasive and omnipotent nature of big data and computation can seem almost mystical. Popular perception and understanding is shaped by oversimplified metaphors or imperceivable abstraction represented through language and code. Seeking a visual representation that can be related to with our bodies, Beatriz Sousa’s video essay shows various images being resampled and resized across different levels of network power, from byte to yottabyte. The upper and lower thresholds of visibility represent not only the thresholds of human understanding and perception, but the thresholds of the computational network. Its true nature as imperfect, quickly exhausted and certainly not infinite is revealed.