Decay, loss, and degradation are always a part of art, as much as artists and collectors might try to fend them off. While physical works might yellow or become more fragile, the decay of digital art is typically less poetic, and involves obsolete file formats, broken links, and corrupted storage.
Toccata, a series of 433 unique works, explores digital decay in a unique way. Andreas Rau and Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez created generative compositions that are both visual and musical. Geometric blocks of color and rotating bundles of lines move to a meandering, disjointed piano melody.
The works are programmed to decay, exhibiting their greatest clarity—in both image and sound—when a birthdate parameter is set to March 2022, their time of their creation. As they progress further from that date, the visuals become fuzzy and distorted, and the soundtrack loses fidelity.
Related Works
Toccata #228Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez / Andreas Rau2022NFT/Digital
Inventory Numbers #60Andreas Rau2025NFT/Digital
Toccata #83Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez / Andreas Rau2022NFT/Digital