Whether as a result of e-mails, photos, videos, documents, shopping carts or search engine queries, regardless of what forms digital data take—the cloud in the Web with its growing number of incessantly running servers sucks it all up like a sponge that is inviolable and has unlimited capacity. Buttoned up and well cooled, thousands of servers assembled in highsecurity zones worldwide do their job 24/7. But like other material objects, these things as well can be physically destroyed. This installation by Stefan Tiefengraber carries on a long tradition of self-destroying machines, and turns over control of the demolition to installation visitors. In response to each click on the www.ugsd.net website (that happens to be located on precisely this server), two of the six hammers mounted atop the server’s housing deliver a vigorous blow to it—and keep it up until the server is out of commission.

The opposite of data storage is data destruction. How close these two are to one another is graphically and amusingly illustrated by your unerasable text. The processual chain commences when a festivalgoer sends an SMS to the installation’s cell phone, and it’s forwarded to a computer.

Message Grave

The computer’s job is to automatically format the text and send it to a printer, which prints it out in DIN A6 format and forwards it, in turn, to a file shredder, where it briefly lies atop a pile of its previously shredded predecessors before it too is cut to ribbons.