Generation loss is the decline in quality that occurs as noise and distortion accumulate each time analog media are copied. It arises in dubbing magnetic tape, rephotographing prints, or photocopying copies, and the distance from the original is marked in the "generation" of the copy. Copying digital data, in principle, loses no information: however many times it is copied, the data remains identical to the original (re-encoding with lossy compression is an exception).
Examples
0xDEAFBEEF's Entropy (2021) is an audiovisual work generated by code stored on Ethereum. Each time its NFT token is transferred, the code applies an artificial degradation resembling the generation loss of analog media. No information is actually lost: the output can be reconstructed in any state from the publicly and immutably stored code. Yet people treat tokens as different according to how many times they have been transferred, so value is socially constructed—and destroyed—through an artificial mechanism. By permanently storing code that describes an impermanent system, the work questions, paradoxically, the permanence that blockchains claim. It was shown in "An Exhibition of Auto-Destructive Art" at NEORT++ in October 2026.