As Far as the Archives Can See
Conceptual text for Home-Platform exhibition.
The world stops again and watches itself watching a breach in the seamless surface of a world of equal access and ability to reproduce. What else is there but to record and store? Where else to look but back at ourselves?
In a world of balloon-enabled connectivity and donkey-driven solar panel-powered water purification units, our product is our progress.
The couple on the beach turns to face the setting sun. Each with one arm raised they capture the moment forever. A thousand years later that sunset has become a landmark; the rocks a monument to a moment in time that was never really a moment at all.
The trees remain. And the image’s unbroken reign stretches back as far as the archives can see.
A watermarked photograph of a 3D printed copyright symbol is undone by a screenshot, a copy and paste, and a picture of a repost of a blog about a tweet about a tweet about copyright and then it’s lost.
Are they crease-marks on the screen?
We build that we may continue to call ourselves builders, and we store that we may recall how we built, from Egypt to Lasceaux, in formats that neither human nor artificial brain could ever fathom.
A wave looks the same from above and below.
What’s yours is mine.