Marty Krikorian
Becoming Weightless
A once-solid language dissolves into air. This sculpture traces the journey of data from the rigid geometry of punched cards to the invisible architectures of cloud computing, where information no longer resides in objects but in motion. Each perforation once carried certainty: data was local, tangible, and secure. To protect it was to protect a physical thing.
As that form dissolves, so does that certainty. Data diffuses into networks, fragmented, encrypted, and scattered across vast constellations of servers. It becomes weightless, placeless, and potentially eternal. Where there was once possession, there is now trust. Security shifts from locks and walls to mathematics and unseen systems.
A paradox emerges. Data is both more secure and more vulnerable, shielded by encryption yet exposed by its ubiquity. It exists everywhere at once, instantly accessible yet difficult to grasp. The work invites viewers into this tension between the comfort of the tangible and the efficiency of the invisible.
The ghost of the punch card lingers in the cloud, a reminder that information was once anchored to the physical world. Now it drifts through systems we cannot see but constantly rely upon. The sculpture holds this transformation open, asking whether making data lighter has also made our relationship to it more fragile and uncertain.