Erasure 01—Why we erase and how can we speculate a process for buraeucratise an Erasure

We erase things a lot in our daily life. The backspace/delete key, an eraser, white-out/liquid paper... I remember that a big thing I missed from the digital space when working traditionally was the undo feature—it made correcting mistakes so much more tedious, as I would have to manually erase a stroke, but not too much so that it will erase a perfectly fine stroke. However, erasing a pencil mark is a lot easier than erasing a pen mark. There used to be 'pen erasers' that are just a blue blog at the end of your eraser, and it just destroyed the paper holding the ink marks, then it evolved into white-out and liquid paper. However, that wasn't the same as erasing, it was just filling in and writing over your old marks. In a way, the way in which we erase marks have evolved to match the medium. Some mediums have an easier way, some a more tedious way. What if in order to erase a mark, you had to fill in a document?

The thought was inspired by Anita Gallagher's experiments about documenting share bikes, and also 'A short story about _____'. What is a field/blank, and how does the information it demands from us tell us about the system that we are in? Initially, the fields I've drafted were simple: What am I erasing, and why. It would be a simple field followed by a multiple-choice.

However, after drawing parallels to demolitions in the real world, I started to look into a demolitions permit and an application for demolition. There are a lot of considerations that are taken into account when a council approves a demolition, and I wanted to see how far I can make a system, or rather, replicate the paperwork that a system that administers and manages erasure from documents.