some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error

 "some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of" is connected to my master degree research in visual poetics ‘Archived Inaccuracies’, where I explore personal digital files, and its public-private consequences, through the exploration of discarded Hard Drives as technological waste (e-waste).

Frequently my work is generated by somekind of archivist impulse: collect, compile, reorder, catalog. It is not by chance that this same set of operative procedures are also the bases of the research presented here. The project, which can be roughly described as a kind of "Hard Drives archeology," eventually appropriated its name from a passage by William Wilson, an investigative tale by Edgar Allan Poe, in which the character recounts: "I wish they would find for me, among The details I'm about to report, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. "

My collection´s process, which was previously focused on searches at flea markets, is now housed in e-waste recycling sheds, whether in Porto Alegre, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, or Lagos, Nigeria (final destination for e-waste from more developed countries). This is where the planned obsolescence materializes - tons of technological material discarded as scrap. Among so many pieces, my search is restricted to hard disks, the computer component responsible for storing data such as photos, videos, music and texts. They are purchased for their physical value, their gross weight, something around U$ 1,00 a kilo. At each field trip, the new HDs are integrated into my catalog (inventory / investigation) that separates them by purchase location, fieldtrip number and their reading test result, moment at which a data recovery software extracts HD´s latent content (green label for the discs from which it was possible to recover data and red for those that don´t). Here we see emerging some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error: photographs and videos of holidays, celebrations, births, rites of the most diverse, besides pornography, music, texts, documents, the daily digital life of the contemporary world. Finding some meaning for this sea of previously lost images may be, as described by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, my link with some hunting instinct since "the hunter would have been the first to" tell a story "because he was the only one able to read , on the silent (if not imperceptible) clues left by prey, a coherent series of events.

After almost two years creating a collection of more than 100 recovered Hard Disks, now I start to give shape to visual stories as games, interfaces and different experiments in collaboration with photographers, musicians and programmers.

Solitaire is one of the "3 games of chance". The complete 32 deck of images can be accessed here: www.leocaobelli.art.br

Palamedes #1, another of the 3 games set, is a midi controled interface that controls 16.000 recovered images from 16 Hard Disks. (The user can navigate through 15 keywords such as parties, selfies, animals, beaches, houses... or interact with the 16.000 photos).

The third game will be a deck of the 22 Major Arcana Tarot cards. This set is currently in editing process.