FORMAT AND CATASTROPHE, 2025: In the logic of digital media, catastrophe does not interrupt the flow of content – it becomes content itself. Images of destruction do not appear outside the system; they exist as part of a continuous update. But what happens when this flow tips – when everything overlaps, glitches, deletes, and overwrites? What might a site of digital catastrophe look like, one that does not restore order but instead creates new conditions for perception and meaning within digital interfaces? This project examines internet image culture through the metaphor of the construction site – a place of transition, provisional, unfinished, suggesting stability yet never fully achieving it. The construction site points to a structure in the making. By contrast, the internet functions as a moving archive: an endless stream of images in which content is not collected but continuously reformatted, reframed, and relocated into new contexts. The installation translates digital principles such as compression, fragmentation, and interface logic into spatial form. Objects emerge that materialize digital experience – referencing pop-up ads, clickbaits, scrolling, zoom-ins, and the shifting of tabs. Here, the format itself becomes visible. The work asks: when exactly does a digital catastrophe begin? Is it the moment content is forced into rigid grids? When design displaces meaning? Or when the format, meant to organize, begins to generate noise?

Screenshots of abandoned websites, static HTML pages, YouTube fragments, and outdated web banners document a digital simultaneity: past and present, trivial and urgent appear side by side in social media “for-you” pages – embedded in identical structural grids. This visual and semantic homogenization profoundly shapes perception. What does it mean when urgency, triviality, and intimacy appear in the same layouts? How does this standardization affect our ability to distinguish context, differentiate meaning, or grasp emotional depth?

At the same time, making formal conditions visible opens new possibilities: interfaces – understood as cultural filters and mediating spaces – do not merely limit but can reweight. Algorithms, feeds, and pre-sorting mechanisms reveal implicit orders and hierarchies, shaping what appears as an image and determining visibility along prestructured selection logics. The catastrophe of the format does not only signify the breakdown of existing structures; it fundamentally questions what constitutes order or disorder in the digital. It asks whether its disembodied, standardized logic already hints at disruptions that can open new aesthetic and epistemic possibilities.

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