So, I'd like to take you on a guided tour...

Our story begins in New York City, on a warm summer's day, August this year, around 51st street. As I walked, I couldn't help noticing the scarcity of litter on the sidewalk — a result no doubt of the "zero tolerance" policing policy put in place by the city's elected representatives. Nonetheless, what litter I could find caught my eye, for amongst the Peter Stuyvesant butts, and the empty Evian bottles, I found discarded boxes of software. This one is just one of many I catalogued, I found it some 100 meters from the Gargantuan CompUSA, one of America's largest computer retail chains.

I tried to imagine the story behind this discarded box: what was the person who dropped it thinking? I've never thrown a box of software out in the street, its too precious, part of the buying fulfilment experience.

Why would someone be so desperate to get their hands on a simple image viewing program?

I imagined their trembling fingers, desperately searching inside the box for those two 3.5 inch floppies, moments after leaving the store. Then, as they are found, the rush, the satisfaction ... and the box is discarded. But the discs are just another form of container: the real fountain of pleasure that is sought, is the not quite random encoding of "ons" and "offs" that represent the transcription of process and purpose. Turing tape for such rigorous and exact attainment by a machine with the limited repertoire of about 500 instructions.