  The clean world of digital information is based on noisy physical devices.
Landauer's principle provides a deep connection between information processing
and the underlying thermodynamics by setting a lower limit on the energy
consumption and heat production of logically irreversible transformations.
While Landauer's original formulation assumes equilibrium, real devices often
do operate far from equilibrium. We show experimentally that the nonequilibrium
character of a memory state enables full erasure with reduced power consumption
as well as negative heat production. We implement the optimized erasure
protocols in an optomechanical two-state memory. To this end, we introduce
dynamical shaping of nonlinear potential landscapes as a powerful tool for
levitodynamics as well as the investigation of far-from-equilibrium processes.
