A filing cabinet is following people around the Royal College of Art to remind us our data is everywhere—and it will follow us everywhere.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is Jaap de Maat's final year project, the finale to a two-year-long MA in Information Experience Design. And anyone visiting the RCA this weekend will certainly get a dose of that design experience, as the clunky metal cabinet trundles towards them, stalking their every move.
"We hit some people, but that's just bruises," de Maat tells us. "Because it's funny, people just accept it." There's probably a whole other dissertation in this statement—our acceptance of pain in the face of hilarity. But for now de Maat's focus has been on themes of loss and the void. In the last chapter of his dissertation on these themes, Additive Subtraction, he debates online data storage. For so long, de Maat was fixated on the appearance of the digital world, as a graphic designer. But throughout his career he has grown preoccupied with what we can't see: "the spaces between the letters".
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