erased causes of climate change

2017
Pencil on recycled paper, 11 x 14 inches
Pencil and eraser shavings in corked glass tube, 0.5 x 4.5 inches
Single-channel video, sound, 37 minutes, 54 seconds

Related project: The Commissar Asks to Be Forgotten

Since 2017, scientists have been scrambling to preserve climate change data erased from the EPA’s website. My project remediates this digital erasure, making it both visible and material. For this durational performance work, I copied by hand and then erased a webpage of data about the causes of climate change, generating my own "data of erasure" in the process: collected samples of eraser and pencil shavings, a log time of 3:12:01, and highly visible erased marks on recycled paper. The project situates the EPA's actions in relation to prominent historical artworks of erasure, such as Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning (1953) and Christian Capurro's Another Misspent Portrait of Etienne de Silhouette (1999-2007).