The Eraser takes your picture and then destroys it, Snapchat-style. Shawn Soh
As Maciej Cegłowski, founder of the bookmarking site Pinboard.io, astutely argued in a recent talk, many of our greatest concerns surrounding technology today can be traced to a single, fundamental disconnect between ourselves and the systems we’ve created: human memory and internet memory are nothing alike. Where we forget, the internet always remembers, and it’s from that unerring record that many of our concerns about privacy, identity, and surveillance stem.
It’s no surprise, then, that when Shawn Soh and Persiis Hajiyanni set out to make an artwork that would “comment on the state of society today,” they settled on this slippery idea of memory as their focus. The duo likes to think of their work, “The Eraser,” as an analog version of Snapchat. You press a button and machine prints your picture on a piece of receipt paper. Moments later it’s fed through a hair straightener, which turns the thermal receipt paper black, erasing your visage just as quickly as it was created.
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