Imagine you could shrink yourself down small enough to swim around your hard drive and meet your files face to face—what would you see? Enter The Machine provides a new way of seeing our digital files, one that does justice to their uniqueness, the diversity of the data they contain, and the complexity by which they are structured.
Enter The Machine 2.0 is a video series that builds on Enter The Machine 1.0 by visualizing the process by which files are formed, i.e., the encoding process.
Enter The Machine 2.0
Enter The Machine 2.0 was first shown in 2017 at the Van Loon Museum in Amsterdam. The museum provided a high resolution image of The Marriage of Willem van Loon with Margaretha Bas by Jan Miense Molenaer for encoding. Sound composition by Krista Dragomer.
Enter The Machine 2.1
Enter The Machine 2.1 is a data portrait comprised of various photos, videos, and audio recordings of the New York Media Center (NYMC) in Brooklyn, New York, where it was shown.
Enter The Machine 2.1 was shown on an 18' x 6' video wall (5760px x 1080px) and runs 6:45 on loop.
Enter The Machine 2.2
Much like Enter The Machine 1.0, this series can take any digital file as an input and show its encoding process. The Enter The Machine 2.2 uses audio from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor, Op. 131: Allegro as performed by the Alban Berg String Quartet (available on Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify).
Enter The Machine 2.3—2.8
Enter The Machine 2.2—2.8 each show the encoding of a different Beethoven string quartet mp3. They were commissioned by Meural Canvas.
There is no denying we live in an age in which all types of information are being digitally encoded at an ever-increasing rate. The more ubiquitous this process becomes, the more unremarkable it is, and now it has reached the point where it isn’t even noticed at all. This video series brings focus back to this omnipresent yet unnoticed part of our digital lives.