The Magnetismus Street Party 2002.

A delete parade, a fete for the faded, for the yellowed! For the many
little zeroes that dance behind red android eyes in lousy cyberpunk B
movies! A party for bringing about and celebrating the loss of cultural
memory. The old bogeyman of the information society should be finally
given a good disregarding. A magnetic act of purification.

Electromagnetic data carriers are subject to the influences of time. Thus errors accumulate due to
a) mechanical influences,
b) chemical influences,
c) thermal influences,
d) influences of external magnetic fields.

Information is affected by the fact that data carriers age. Bits can no longer be read or they may be altered, and thus the information is lost. Correct handling and storage are the basic requirements for keeping your data carriers in good condition. Improper handling may produce scratches and therefore mechanical damage of the data carrier. The data carrier must be protected from dust and other contamination. Even fingerprints left on data media are to be avoided. Here the most important chemical processes are corrosion and hydrolysis. High temperatures will cause the data carrier to expand. Due to rotational instability, errors may thus occur in the reading process. Moreover, high temperatures will aggravate the chemical processes mentioned above. With regard to magnetic storage, data may even be deleted directly by very high temperatures (above 250° C). The same may happen if the data carrier is exposed to magnetic fields.
Perfect.

The Magnetism Street Party 2002 ...
…will take place on 13 July 2002, between 2 and 6 p.m., Mariahilferstasse/Rahlgasse.
The motto is ‘Zeroize it! Hardcore gaussing!’ and the user-friendly team of the disposition group monochrom will delete your data utilising several strong neodym magnets and some not so strong bar magnets while listening to timely underground mainstream techno and house rhythms. Hand over your video tapes, music records, credit cards, motherboards and/or jazz/zip/syquest data carriers!

The destruction of magnetic data media is a type of destruction one may well call unspectacular. However. It is correct anyway.
Our society gathers, collects and amasses. Our hard disks are full.
But the bourgeois-humanist critique ‘the informational flood’, this maelstrom that seems to attack the printed word, may kiss our Baudrillardian asses. All the lamenting about the net being a threat to high culture is as alien to us as Whiskas to Adorno. Our project, which is ‘Youth in Vienna’ approved, is more of an attempt to actively deal with an aspect of info society which is almost completely ignored by our cognitive machinery.
‘We want to give it an image more positive than the pathogenous. We refuse to regard as experienceable only that part of life which is expressible, explainable, and instrumentalisable. We refuse to accept oblivion as the appendix of memory,’ said Herwig Turk once. Let us write this on our magnets!

Today it is impossible to store digital data for over a decade so that its readability is guaranteed. This is mainly due to the quick development of hard- and software and thus the rapid obsolescence of data systems. However, the physical durability of data carriers operated by current technologies also restricts the service life of digital data to a few decades. According to information technology, 60% of the landing on the moon never happened. Most of the magnetic tapes from the 60s and early 70s have already been damaged and can no longer be read. This also effects data which has not even been analysed. Good!

Delete is just another word for nothing left to lose.