Watch your selfies crumble into dust with Polish art collective PanGenerator

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A Polish art installation is exploring the transient world of the selfie by letting visitors watch their own faces disintegrate into dust.

Warsaw-based art collective PanGenerator created hash2ash: Everything saved will be lost for a special exhibition on teenage life at the city’s National Ethnographic Museum.

After uploading their selfies to a special web page, visitors can see their face recreated on a big screen using thousands of “virtual particles”. The image then slowly falls away, becoming a pile of black grains that gather at the bottom of the installation.

The installation taps into a human need to document the lives we lead — as well as the fear of losing our digital footprint as technology evolves.

hash2ash: Everything saved will be lost will be on display at the Warsaw National Ethnographic Museum until 28 February.