Michaela Lakova

DEL?No, wait!REW is an automatized system, which recovers files from hard drives without the consent or the knowledge of the previous owners, who presume their content has been forever deleted. DEL?No, wait!REW asks is it possible to delete information in the digital age?Whether our storage devices are locally present (hard drives) or dislocated (the cloud), can we ever be certain our data has been permanently deleted? In the ongoing conversation around the impossibility of erasing digital traces, what role do we take? Are we plunderers, interpreters or mediators?

DEL1_peq

DEL2_peq DEL3_peq

Bio

Michaela Lakova Mail
http://mlakova.org
Piet Zwart Institute
Bulgaria

Michaela Lakova (BG) is a visual artist currently based in Rotterdam. She studied under the Media Design and Communication MA (Piet Zwart Institute). She holds a BA (NATFA) in Stage and Screen design. Her field of research and practice invokes catchy bits and bytes of errors, systems malfunction and the inevitable generation of data traces and its problematic resistance to deletion. Her last work DEL?No Wait!REW installation takes a forensic approach to a collection of discarded hard drives, constructively problematizes the notion of “deletion” confronting the audience with larger questions of data ownership and the ethics around data recovery.