Dump Site
About Dump Site

About Dump Site:

Dump Site is stewarded by Ven Qiu and Dorothy Tang, with Robin O on site design.

Dump Site is a submission-based repository of deleted media. This virtual landfill is a multimedia mass of files that were recently deleted and almost erased. What we throw away is a candid echo of what we keep close: projects, secrets, gripes, inspirations, loved ones. Dump Site is a public diary, a screenshot confessional. Conjuring memory through the lens of discard, these second-hand files evoke a sentimental gaze toward desktop debris.

Gathering in our hard drive, our files trace the contours of our relationships, work, and identity. To contend with storage capacity, we take on the duty of deletion (some more than others). We trash files that feel irrelevant, reserving memory for potentially relevant files in the future. In this way, deleting is both a pragmatic act and a curatorial one. Archivists in our own right, we prune our hard drive to assemble a personal history. The trash folder provides a fantasy of complete erasure: files vaporized with a simple click and drag.

When we pull files out of the trash folder and re-signify them as artifacts of history, we reinstate their thingness. Dump Site enlists visitors to put their own trash files in context with others, building a collective silhouette of a greater digital narrative. Pooling digital trash enables us to reminisce across desktops. Through the creation of a trash archive, we enrich digital files with metadata surrounding the conditions of deletion and transform deleted files into a tangible substrate for cultural memory.

Deletion occurs across a spectrum of privacy: within our personal devices, online communities, and cultural institutions. Dump Site preserves media within this spectrum, and researches how policy changes and mass deletion events interface with these degrees of privacy. As we steward this archive, we ask: How does digital trash reflect cultural memory and fill the gaps? How does archiving trash and embracing mess expand archival practice? What are the mechanics that drive deletion and how do they affect collective access to public information? This digital trash heap metabolizes deleted files into archaeological artifacts. Dump Site has three goals: to research the conditions of deletion; make mess out of archival practice; and preserve artifacts of digital cultural memory that are removed against our will.


About Us:

Ven Qiu is a memory worker and creative technologist based in the Bay Area, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. They draw from their work as a tattooer, archivist, and researcher to explore the textures of memory and archival practice. Their work most often involves oral history, field recording, body-art, scent, and born-digital media. Qiu also moonlights as a meme admin.

Dorothy Tang is an archivist interested in translating memories and emotions through a variety of mediums, such as oral history, digital expression, and scent. Their work is informed by community archival practices, which center collective ownership, reflection and sense making. Their research interests include: information and power, sensory-based archival activation, reparative archives, and nontraditional repositories.

Robin O is an anti-disciplinary artist who works with text, sound, and image. They also work as a designer and coder, interested in poetic computation and elevating clean functional design systems. Their current research interests include poetics of memory and relation, quantum and dynamical systems, and the spirituality and mysticism of the cosmos. With Dump Site, they use their design and coding practice to create engaging and alternative interactions to data and web archives.

Collection Development Policy

Introduction

Dump Site is a virtual landfill of multimedia files that were recently deleted or at risk of deletion. This Collection Development Policy outlines our guidelines and procedures regarding our development, management, and accession activities.

Mission

Dump Site’s mission is twofold: document and politicize deletion. Dump Site interrogates the political, cultural, and financial forces that drive deletion and shape digital record. We serve a community of researchers, archivists, and netizens who care about the full breadth of digital cultural memory and feel an urgency around its obsolescence.

Our archive prioritizes media that sits outside of the demands of capital and empire. We collect media that was removed through seemingly innocuous mechanisms for censorship such as Terms of Service, copyright, or account strikes. Deletion is foundational to the erasure of marginalized netizens, disproportionately affecting QTBIPOC people, political activists, sex workers, and other netizens who create media deemed irrelevant or threatening to platform capitalism. Dump Site is interested in documenting how these communities are written out of online spaces and removed from digital record.

Values

  • Data Sovereignty We value digital tools that provide custody and agency over our collections sustainably and ethically. We prioritize free and open-source software (FOSS) and divest from exploitative tech companies that further U.S. surveillance and imperialism. We respect the privacy and anonymity of Dump Site donors and visitors. We do not collect visitor information (e.g. IP addresses), track visitor activity, or require names for donations.
  • Centering marginalized perspectives We take a critical archival studies approach to collection development and building exhibits. We understand the archive as a site of power and an ongoing negotiation of what subjectivities are remembered and thus, legitimized. By looking at deleted media, we confront issues of archival erasure. We honor marginalized perspectives by engaging digital objects with intellectual rigor, compassion, and curiosity. We work with scholars, archivists, artists, and technologists who have a critical and liberatory perspective on digital archives and deletion.
  • Trauma Informed We prioritize social responsibility and harm mitigation in our selection criteria. We consider the harm that can be done by featuring sensitive materials on our website. For triggering or harmful material, we include safeguards (e.g. content warnings, contextual information) in place to ensure site visitors and collaborators can engage with the material on their own terms.

History of Collection

Dump Site started as an archival art project aiming to capture the aesthetic and sonic timbre of deleted media. As our project grew, we began to ask “why did this get deleted?” and observed pervasive power structures driving the deletion of media in our collection. We began to see the collection as evidence of how political and commercial interests mediate digital cultural memory. Dump Site now serves as an archive of digital items that make visible the [invisible] mechanisms of control that jeopardize our autonomy as netizens.

Who is Dump Site for?

  • Researchers who are interested in deletion, censorship, and/or digital history (e.g. those studying cyberethnology, media studies, software studies, digital law, etc)
  • Archivists (professional or otherwise) who care about preserving digital cultural memory
  • Netizens who want to share outtakes/fleeting moments to create a public record collaboratively
  • Netizens who value tech sovereignty and seek self-governed digital spaces
  • Artists whose work is limited by Terms of Service (ToS) and want a home for their creative output

You can further Dump Site’s mission by uploading trash and providing details about why each item was deleted. This information is incredibly important for us to be able to document and observe trends in the types of materials that are more vulnerable to deletion.

Feel free to browse through the trash—if anything intrigues you and you end up writing about deleted files or Dump Site as a whole, please share with us!

We also welcome collaborators—if you are an archivist, researcher, artist, and/or technologist interested in deletion, digital cultural memory, or tech sovereignty, we’d love to talk. We’re especially interested in digital materials of communities and subcultures that are disproportionately vulnerable to deletion. Email us at 4ever@duuump.site.

Scope

Collecting Areas

Personal Computing: This is media that was deleted from personal devices (e.g. cell phone, laptop, hard drive). These items were deleted by the contributor themself, either as a pragmatic act or a curatorial one. The media in this collection gives insight into the uncurated lives and relationships outside of social media or the digital commons. This includes: outtakes, drafts, screenshots, notes, and any other desktop debris.

Social Networks: This is media that was deleted from a public digital space (e.g websites, forums, and social media). This includes media the contributor deleted themself or deleted by the platform due to a Terms of Service violation or copyright strike. In the social networks collection, we collect both the original post as well as ancillary documents that indicate proof of deletion (e.g. notifications or emails from the platform informing the contributor of the deletion and/or strikes on their account).

Public Organizations: This is media that was deleted from collectives, political organizations, or libraries due to public pressure, censorship, or other threats. This includes media deleted from their website(s) and digital assets removed from their holdings. Contributors include individuals in and out of the organization who have observed such deletion (ex. materials recovered by Wayback Machine).

Languages/Geographical Areas collected and excluded
We accept deleted media produced in all languages and uploaded from all countries. However, Dump Site is a U.S.-based archive and operates from a U.S. perspective on digital rights, data privacy, and cultural memory.

Chronological periods collected and excluded
We collect digital media from 1993 to the present. 1993 marked a pivotal year for digital media as the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) made the World Wide Web free to the public.

Formats collected and excluded
Dump Site welcomes all file types (text, image, document, sound, video, web) of most subject matter, so long as it fits our selection criteria. See Selection Criteria for more details.

Selection Criteria

Materials submitted to Dump Site’s collections go through an approval process conducted by Dump Site’s archivists. In order for items to be approved for upload, they must meet the following criteria:

  • If made publicly available, the materials (including creative works) should fall under fair use and/or Creative Commons.
    • We do not accept full, unaltered copyrighted materials such as entire books or movies.
  • If you are not the copyright holder of a piece of digital media, you should get permission from the copyright holder and all parties depicted before uploading to Dump Site.
    • Ex. If you submit a screenshot of a private conversation, you need to get the permission of all participants of the conversation.
  • The material should not contain or depict language with hate speech, which we define as abusive or threatening speech that expresses hate on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The material should not be submitted if it could lead to the harassment of yourself or another.
  • The material should not contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII). It is your responsibility to redact/blur PII from the files you upload. If there is PII in a file, the PII may be redacted or the entire file rejected at the discretion of the archivists.
    • What constitutes as PII?
      • Names: Full name, maiden name, mother's maiden name, and other aliases.
      • Personal identification numbers: Social Security number, passport number, driver's license number, and taxpayer identification number.
      • Personal contact information: Home addresses, email, phone numbers, and employment information.
      • Financial information: Credit card information, financial account numbers.
      • Other information: Date of birth, place of birth, ZIP code, medical records, fingerprints, vehicle plate number.
      • Please note: QR codes, bar codes, and purchase orders may inadvertently reveal PII.

Collection Weaknesses

Our collection skews toward a more tech savvy audience. We are working to engage with people at all levels of tech literacy. This will require targeted outreach to ensure our collection has a more comprehensive coverage of digital cultures.

Our collection primarily consists of materials from our Personal Computing collecting area. We are in the collecting phase for our Social Networks and Public Organization collections.

Review and Revision

This collection development policy will be reviewed and updated periodically by the Dump Site team. Last updated July 29, 2026.