Joel Becker’s Visions of Entropy is a public zine project and installation available for free throughout CAFKA.23 exhibition zones in Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge. The collection of zines celebrates happy accidents, employing collage and experimental scan art and analogue video glitching techniques that interrogate the place of technology and control by way of a dedicated emphasis on producing unexpected, and ultimately interesting visual results. These zines explore how our digital footprints, relationships, and memories stay with us; how we stay by our own selves by reclaiming those past experiences; and how these all things, even the digital, are ultimately temporary. Our people, our memories, and our data stay with us – but only for a time.

Becker’s zines explore trippy digital autobiographies that reference his personal ethnographic research growing up alongside technology. Memory is a double-entendre as he searches his own file database to rediscover past events and friendships. However, the purported flawlessness of digital technology is ultimately challenged as those records emerge incorrect or out of context, demonstrating how memories and experiences cannot be replaced by machines and warning against attempting to outsource not just memory but thought itself as the power of technology accelerates. Becker also seeks moments of tenderness amidst the tumult of digital life, both as he escapes technology into nature and as he reclaims the stories of his digital past. Throughout the project we see experimental glitch art as both a symbol of decay and a vehicle for nostalgia — asking “what does glitch art mean?” even as the question itself visually disintegrates into meaninglessness.

Visions of Entropy will be accessible through Little Libraries in the region as a limited-run of small zines freely available to collect, keep, and redistribute amongst your friends.