Installation as part of the Digital Aurora exhibition displayed at Depot Artspace, Devonport, Aotearoa. Digital screens, wooden frames, Raspberry Pis.

.* (“dot-star”, or, in regex: “everything, as long as there is anything”) is a triptych of works presenting endless waves of data, continually overwriting each other. The piece swallows its viewers with the sheer magnitude of information that exists and grows. Specific words are occasionally highlighted amidst the torrent, questioning where we glimpse substance within what would otherwise be a meaningly abyss of everything.

The first screen pulls data using a Wikipedia crawler — the realm of known information. The second screen lists real-time metadata of videos published on YouTube, a representation of the swelling ocean of data that joins what already exists. The final crawler lists patents and their owners: the colours on this final screen are inverted, pitting patents as a form of information piracy, erasing from our sphere of possibility.