Measuring Dust
Terminal Script, Photography
Developed for, and selected by Der Greif Guest Room: The Brilliance of the Mundane, curated by Annet Dekker & Margriet Schavemaker, 2026.
© chris.photo. All rights reserved.
Polvere means ‘dust’ in Italian.
It is also a terminal script. It measures the invisible sedimentation accumulating atop my photographic archive, a decade of images made with a compact camera.
It calculates the ‘dust’ on each file: days since creation, divided by file size in bytes (days ÷ bytes). The smaller the file, the less body there is to resist interment, and the more dust accumulates. The thinnest images carry the thickest layers. A file from 2016 weighing 500 kilobytes has been gathering dust for eleven years. It is all time, and no image.
The script reads every file on the drive, looking for camera-original files that are, to date, unseen. These never-opened files have passed from sensor to storage without witness, living a forgotten existence. Polvere returns four files carrying the heaviest layers of sediment.
Then it opens them.
In doing so, it erases the accumulated dust. The act of seeing destroys the condition that made them visible to the script. They can never be surfaced this way again.