P I L E S :

Overload refers not only to a virtual condition of data saturation, but also to a surfeit of material and hardware, including piles of obsolete computers and reams of printouts clogging landfills.

While the history of mass communications, beginning with the printing press, is typically marked by an ongoing increase in media production and consumption, the information age is the spike in the curve of exponential rates of growth. Rather than erasing earlier media, the computer has instead re-structured modes of productive output to establish nothing less than a media “explosion.”

Information may be assessed not just through its speed of production and circulation, but also through its tendency to pile up. The wasted heaps of information-commodities reveal the mechanisms of excess that are central to this particular economy.