Contains Itself is a software trying to achieve duration through the cultural practice of collecting.

The software is surfing through the net, searching for data files to collect in order to create its own unique self through its collection.

One difference between human and software is the awareness of time. While it‘s existing for humans, in software only discrete points exist as digits. How can software have duration?

Contains Itself is a software trying to achieve duration through the cultural practice of collecting.
Within a collection time is collected. Especially through the amount of time it takes to build the collection. Additionally time is within the historicity of the collected items.
Within the collection the collector is constructing and searching itself.

In informatics a container/ collection is an abstract data type which stores elements of the same type. A container format stores elements of different data types with the purpose that this data makes a meaningful whole thing.

The software is surfing through the net, searching for data files to collect in order to create its own unique self through its collection.

As every collector defines an own set of rules for the collection, Contains Itself does as well:
The self is reduced to its code. The code is reduced to its line length and thus represented through a histogram. This gives the software the ability to compare itself with all the files it finds. Every found file is transformed into a histogram to compute the difference to the self.

If a file is similar enough to itself (what happens very rarely) it‘s included into the collection, otherwise it’s ignored.