Only Everything Lasts Forever

Only Everything Lasts Forever

is a very long sound composition for MP3.

It contains every sound we can distinguish as humans, as dictated by the MP3 specification (ISO/IEC 11172-3). It explores the social and political associations of sound representation, and the psychology and philosophy of noise and emptiness.

It draws on enumerative pieces like Every Icon, readymades and other “empty art” like 4'33", and glitch work as exemplified by Yasunao Tone, the Ceibas Cycle and the Flickr glitch art pool.

While the entire composition is approximately 10⁴⁵⁰ years long, the first month of the composition was streamed from a server room at EMPAC starting on Sunday March 28th 2010 at 7 PM EST.

Two days after the opening, on Tuesday, March 30th from 7–9 PM EST, there was a meetup for offline discussion in West Hall Gallery 111 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The next portion of the composition was streamed during GLI.TC/H 2010 starting on Tuesday, September 28th 2010 at midnight CDT. It ran until January 4th 2011, when the server crashed due to a glitch (a hard drive failure).

It continued in Lincoln, Nebraska with the “Work Makes the Work” exhibition, organized by Jeff Thompson, from January 19th through February 18th, 2011.

Only Everything Lasts Forever

is an open source project toward the fulfillment of an MFA. All source, including the written thesis, is now available on GitHub; the original project is preserved in the Google Code archive.