Brief
Recording medias (film, cassette, CD,..) is a sacred place where our most beautiful memories are stored; an object of worship in their own materiality. Fossils numériques is an imaginary exhibition that aims to question the conservation of these media in the future. How do these mass products (for personal and short-term use) last over time?
Project type: Research, Design Fiction, Academic Project
Role: Designer
Tools: Clay, Canon 6D camera, Photoshop, MakeyMakey
Year: 2021
About archives
“It is necessary to reduce objects to their raw state as fossils, between the sample and the series, the specimen and the type. The prototype of the fossil represents both this archaeological debris, this imprint or trace [...] in the sedimentary layers of the earth's crust, but also, the hole, the pit, the tomb, or the dungeon, which freeze or fix the object outside of time.”
— Serge Margel, The Phantom Archives.
Intention
Dedicated to my fascination with the image industry, I decided to create fossils of storage media as old as the Pathé-Baby, one of the first amateur cinema systems launched in 1922 by Charles Pathé, to film photography, Mini DV and the ubiquitous digital DVD format.
I also imagined a fictitious exhibition in which these fossils would be presented to the public. I soon realized that it was essential to create a link between these material “fossils” and the “digital, ghostly” content they might contained.
