Zuse Strip

A piece of movie film has survived the forthcoming Ice Age and is discovered by Venusian scientists--5000 years from now... This work is a correspondence of two information fragments of different origins and times that met by accident. Cinema transforms into a three-dimensional landscape--utilizing data that is based on an archaeological misinterpretation. Zuse Strip is named after Konrad Zuse’s first digital computer. It used discarded 35mm movie film from the German UFA as a medium to read and write 8-bit binary code data with a hole-punch system. The work was inspired by Lev Manovich's text “Cinema by Numbers”, as well as “The Deciphering of Linear B" by linguist/archaeologist John Chadwick.

“Obsolescence remains the repressed of innovation, and as past information is encoded in defunct systems, how will the past be preserved? Translation (from the Latin 'translatio', to bear across) is a journey, not instantaneous transmission, and these travels of re-encoding, transcription and compression re-mark their info-passengers with the codes of the present.” --Mike Hoolboom