红油抄手 | Red Oil Wontons
A single JPEG of a bowl of red oil, resaved more than 5,000 times until the image collapses into color blocks and the vessel becomes the content.
Serial Glitch Prints, Installation, Generative Art
2015
Red Oil Wonton is a demonstration of digital entropy and generation loss, during which information inevitably collapses in the transition between relay and preservation. In this project, a single JPEG of a bowl of red oil is processed through a Shell script, duplicated and overwritten more than 5,000 times. Through this ritual of digital reproduction, the image undergoes a radical entropy—losing its representational data to become increasingly abstracted.
The work draws a parallel to the anatomy of a wonton: a vessel defined by its flour skin, capable of holding any filling, yet identifiable only by its exterior form. Over thousands of generations, the digital void of the oil solidifies into raw color blocks, where the vessel of the file finally becomes the content itself.
