Felix Saxa sat down with Renard Baudrillard to discuss his project “Digital Fossil.” The following is a transcript of their discussion.
Felix : Welcome, dear listeners, to another edition of our podcast “Shooting the Sh*t and Eating Some Food.” Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Renard Baudrillard, an artist who rejects that label and now insists on being referred to as a hose. He has been making waves with his latest project, Digital Fossil. Renard, thank you for joining us.
Renard : It’s great to be here.
Felix: Today we are serving Crispy Duck Salad from Hakkasan. What do you think?
Renard: I like it. But I am starting to feel that this salad is going the way of seared tuna from decades back and truffle everything which just won’t die.
Felix: Can’t we just react to flavor, presentation, and mouthfeel?
Renard: Do I have to answer that?
Felix : Renard, I’ve been following your work for a while, and Digital Fossil really caught my attention. But before we dive into the specifics, I’m curious to learn how the idea for this project was born.
Renard : Who knows how these sorts of things emerge, I guess the closest I can come to fixing a point is an afternoon spent at a friend’s house—she works for Vogue, so you can imagine the stacks of magazines scattered all over. I remember noticing how they were in various states of wear, some as though freshly pressed, others torn and faded. She was droning on about something or other, and I got to thinking about how physical publications are being replaced by digital media the way online shopping has replaced brick and mortar retail and that got me wondering—do things somehow age online as they do in the real world? Does the digital decay? Booom! I get smacked in the head by a magazine and my eyes refocus to see Birgit Freund staring at me as the words “RB ARE YOU LISTENING?” echo in my ears.
Felix : laughs Birgit Freund! Did you piss yourself?
Renard : Almost but my bladder control is competition-class. Anyway, the thought stuck with me and I started thinking more about digital decay, and that’s how Digital Fossil came to be. I wanted to explore the idea of a digital aging. So, I used a downsampling algorithm to induce degradation, progressively reducing the quality of the image over 148 stages as if the file were being ravaged by time.
Felix : And why 148? That’s a very specific number.
Renard : It was just the point where the degradation plateaued. At first, each pass through the downsampler results in noticeable loss of detail and artifacting, but as the image “decays”, the changes become less pronounced, almost imperceptible. It’s kind of like how a fossil stabilizes over time. The image reaches a point where there’s no more significant detail to lose, and that’s where it stops changing in any noticeable way. The plateau.
Felix : So, the image is wasting away, but then it hits a point where it can’t really degrade any further?
Renard : Right. And that ties into the math of it.
Felix: No math please.
Renard: Laughs No no, it’s nothing too obtuse. When you downsample an image, you’re essentially averaging out pixel values in groups. Early on, each pass strips away a lot of detail, but as the data becomes more homogenized, the algorithm can’t really differentiate between pixels anymore. It’s a consequence of entropy leveling out, the image no longer has enough fidelity to lose anything substantial. So after a certain number of iterations, the degradation reaches an asymptote.
Felix: I can’t believe you said asymptote. This is the second time I hear that word in a week after almost an entire lifetime of absence.
Renard: Where did you hear asymptote?
Felix: You know Hector Dupaix right?
Renard: I’m not sure I do…
Felix: Hector, the guy who became famous for sc…
Renard: Oh, yes, yes…
Felix: Well, he’s now written a book, and I recently sat down with him to talk about it and at a certain point in the conversation he said that human experience bears an asymptotic relationship with the ideal forms and that we can never experience them no matter what we do.
Renard: Oh right. Interesting. Crazy how things “trend” in our lives for a certain time and then they disappear. You think you’ll hear asymptote again?
Felix: Laughs. Somehow I doubt it. But back to topic, so are you saying that digital imagery have a base skeleton, if you will, that downsampling reveals?”
Renard: Not quite. I mean you can have a hi-fi dinosaur fossil and a lo-fi one depending on various factors, it all depends on the image you start with and the downsampling algorithm.
Felix : It’s still fascinating how that mirrors what happens in the natural world with fossils. They degrade until they stabilize into something preserved over time.
Renard : Well, you get different types of fossils depending on the process—some are impressions left behind, others are fully mineralized, like bones turned to stone. But they all share that idea of degradation ultimately stabilizing. In Digital Fossil, the plateau mirrors that moment when the fossil is preserved, where it’s no longer decaying, but it’s far from what it once was.
Felix : So, are you suggesting there’s a similar process happening with data? That over time, it degrades and fossilizes in a sense?
Renard : I am. Data stored digitally degrades over time—not necessarily in terms of pixels, but in terms of recall integrity or file compatibility. Think about it: 1000 years from now, much of what we store today will likely be incomplete, corrupt, or incompatible with future systems. Future historians or archaeologists—digital archaeologists, if you will—will need to sift through the remnants of our digital lives the way paleontologists dig through fossils.
Felix : So, we’re looking at the rise of “digital paleontologists” or “digiteologists” unearthing “datasaurs”?
Renard : Exactly. We will be piecing together fragments from the past, just like paleontologists, we will have to reconstruct entire systems from fragments, analyzing the strata of our digital history.
Felix : The thought of that is both fascinating and a little terrifying. Do you think we’ll ever reach a point where we can preserve everything perfectly?
Renard : I doubt it. I think the allure of Digital Fossil is that it references something immutable about creation the inevitability of decay. I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of decay.
Felix : I didn’t take you for an afficionado of the macabre.
Renard: I don’t think it’s that really because I am not interested in the morbid or the gory. I think what draws me to decay is more about what peaks through from the past. It’s more about connecting with what has ceased to be and extrapolating what may have been there from what remains.
Felix: I like that. So for you it’s about puzzling out what was there from the remains.
Renard: I think so.
Felix: What’s next for you after Digital Fossil?
Renard : I’m diving into how information decay manifests in biological environments. While quantum computing is currently taking up everyone’s attention because of its potential for a paradigm shift in processing, organic computing—using biological systems for data storage and processing—is a present curiosity that will undoubtedly see major development. I’m exploring how data would decay in that kind of system.
Felix : Organic computing? Like using brain tissue or living organisms as usable computers?
Renard : Exactly. Imagine being able to input and output from brain tissue. The question becomes: how does data degradation work in an organic medium? What does it mean when you lose information saved in a chemical form, as opposed to binary code in silicon? Is it more or less stable and is it so inherently or is it dependent on other factors. So for example, would our ability to code stem cells to ensure the integrity of memories make forgetting obsolete? How would that affect us? We believe there is solace in forgetting. Imagine having control over what you recall and what you forget. Would hoarders get buried in memories? Would we prefer degradation of memories or erasure? It’s a frightening prospect but one with which we may soon be confronted.
Felix : I had no idea your work extended so far beyond the aesthetic.
Renard : There’s something ironically annihilative about permanence in the same way that we imagine living forever something categorically different from the meaning of life. These paradoxes have always interested me.
Felix : I have to end it here as we’re out of time and increasingly out of my depth, but I think you should talk to Hector Dupaix about how these ideas play out on different scales of time and matter.
Felix raises his glass in a toast. “To the datasaurs and the digiteologists who will uncover them.”
Renard : laughs “To decay!”
Felix : Thanks for coming on the program, Renard. And for our listeners, if you haven’t already, check out Renard Baudrillard’s work on his Instagram account, @r.baudrillard. Thanks for tuning in.
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