Computation unfolds through countless microscopic reads and writes that pass through layered memory, each with its own rhythm. Registers hold data for nanoseconds, forming a present so brief it is almost outside time. Cache keeps values for microseconds, a moment between appearance and disappearance. DRAM survives only through continuous electrical support, a millisecond based memory that lives by maintenance. NAND flash never fully erases. Old values remain as faint electrical residues for weeks or years, creating scattered afterimages. Magnetic disks and tape stretch this tempo further, from years to decades, forming slow mechanical archives that resemble thin layers of sediment.

These rhythms depend on the larger systems that feed them. Every overwrite and transfer consumes power that has already moved through grids, fuels, renewable sources, cooling systems, and transmission lines. What feels like an instant of calculation is stretched across this entire chain, from extraction to heat release. A single query stays in memory for only milliseconds but leaves traces of heat, wear, and charge that accumulate across devices and infrastructures.

All of these temporal scales return to the long duration of Earth. The materials that make memory possible, such as silicon, cobalt, copper, and rare earths, come from geological processes that unfold over millions of years. They move quickly through circuits before reappearing as waste, forming new layers of matter that will last far beyond the systems that produced them.

This project translates these hidden times into perception through five installations: Register as a flash of light, Cache as a short lived poem, RAM as a volatile matrix that disappears when power ends, NAND Flash as a mechanical graphite plotter that overwrites itself, and Earth as a heavy stone pulled slowly through space.

A example of the fragmented data visualisation

https://visualizer.junghsu.com/visualizer.html