After creating an online quiz (more info about that here) to better understand my presence on the internet, I found out–by using low-ball estimates of conversion–that I take up about 1Gigabyte of data usage a day. I do this in the time that I spend watching short videos on Youtube each night, listening to Spotify while walking down the street, and streaming Netflix before bed.
I was shocked at how easy it was to use up this much data and how easily 1 full Gigabyte of data can become brushed over in daily conversation. In an economic region where it is normal to buy 128GB iPhones, 1GB of data may not shock people as much as it shocked me.
Therefore keeping in mind my interest in the internet’s physicality, I decided to replicate 1GB of undefined “data” in a some sort of parallel physical representation. Each LEGO piece in the above photographed installation represents 1MB of data. There are 1000MB in 1GB, and therefore there are therefore 1000 LEGO pieces in the installation; one for each MB.
My aim was to remind people that Gigabytes and Megabytes aren’t just abstractions of numeric value; they are measurements for the physical amount of space data takes up.