Memories of a Farm is a book-sculpture that examines the materiality of the internet and collective memory. A combination of images—found and searched for—and fictional text recast information as tangible and embodied things that move. By situating ourselves within the ecology of memory and storage, we begin to see tension arise between the producers of memory technology/prosthesis and its consumers—as we store more and more information in digital form and thus necessitate more and more storage media, more and more earth is removed, landscapes shifted, peoples displaced, and ancestral practices forgotten. None of this is new. Digital technology wears a thin cloak of immateriality that veils the very same infrastructure and patterns of exploitation that have been in place since before its inception. History haunts in the structure and logic of digital technology as well as its content: memetic images and text ceaselessly refer back to prior iterations, a perpetual remembering and amnesia.

...All of this happens not just on remote lands, or in the cloud, but here...

...To make this book, I collected internet images as if they were washed ashore, battered and defaced. The resolution of the images were intentionally lowered or kept low in order to attack the authority invested in them, especially when they’re high-res. The pixelization evokes the images as material, as bits and pieces that move around and recombine. I wrote the text separately, but when presented alongside the images, they form a curious connection not unlike image-caption. The text loosely threads together themes of remote storage, resource extraction and alchemy, labor, historical patterns, memes, and collective sense-making: the journey of a stone, how it is removed from earth and transformed into the substrate of digital memory. Not all of what’s written is factual, however—I made a bunch of shit up.