Des Frags Process

Des Frags Process is a reactivation of Des Frags, a project first released online in 2000.

The work takes a source image and submits it to a protocol of recomposition. This image defines the format, the grid and the chromatic reference of the mosaic. Depending on the selected influence, it can also be overlaid transparently on the mosaic at 0, 25 or 50% opacity. Every image is destined to disappear.

Keywords do not generate the image. They filter local data and enable searches in open collections. Collected images are prepared as fragments, then each fragment is analyzed, compared and placed according to its chromatic proximity to a cell of the source image. The mosaic is progressively constructed, cell after cell.

Some areas may remain empty because no fragment answers the conditions of the protocol, or because a degree of incompletion has been deliberately chosen. These voids reveal the limits and decisions of the recomposition system. Absence is a datum of the protocol, not a fabrication defect.

An image is never produced once and for all. It successively passes through construction, presence, stability, erosion, disappearance and trace. The disappearance is not an external operation: the exact order of construction is recorded, and erosion follows it in reverse. The last cell placed is the first erased. Each generation enters an ephemeral archive. It first preserves the conditions of its appearance, remains stable for 30 days, then gradually loses its cells over 90 days. When the project storage approaches its 5 GB threshold, storage pressure accelerates this erosion. At 0% presence, the image, the submitted source image and the detailed files are erased from the server. Only a minimal record of the disappearance remains. The archive preserves objects less than it makes their passage perceptible.

Two kinds of void coexist. Initial voids are transparent: they belong to the construction of the image and have never contained a fragment. Erased cells are opaque, white or black according to the recorded background of the generation: they indicate that a fragment existed and then disappeared. An initial void can never become an erased cell. The image remains readable as a stratigraphy distinguishing what never took place from what took place and is no longer there.

As erosion progresses, the mosaic fills with monochrome cells. The image, initially composed of fragments of varied provenance, tends toward a uniform black or white field before disappearing completely. The protocol does not merely destroy: it converts heterogeneity into monochrome and makes monochrome the terminal state of every image.

The visitor can download the current state of an image. This local copy does not interrupt the server-side erasure protocol: the image continues to disappear while the copy persists elsewhere. Downloading immediately ends the temporary right to delete the generation. Preservation becomes an individual decision outside the system, not a property of the archive.

Reactivating Des Frags therefore does not consist in restoring an earlier form. It moves the project into a contemporary environment made of corpora, APIs, open collections, similarity calculations and visible limits. The fragment is no longer only a piece of an image: it becomes the unit of a process of construction, erosion and disappearance.