As one of the children born into the last half century of the last millennium, I was born into analog life only to find myself destined to dying a digital death…
Potsherd
1 — a pottery fragment usually unearthed
as an archaeological relic.
but it’s not just the death of knobs and levers, or even the way it’s placed the Library of Alexandria in every one of our pockets while selling our eyes to the highest bidder… no, it’s even stickier than that…
Tryptich
1 — a picture or relief carving on three panels, typically hinged together side by side and used as an altarpiece
2 — a set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together
My generational cohort is already heir to more than a lifetime’s worth of the best and worst, the trifling and middling, the full, sloppy living off of the western humanity that came before us, all accidentally and intentionally suspended in the amber of our media in fact, if you stopped everything else and dedicated every waking hour for the rest of your life to watching films, television shows, home movies, and industrial training reels, a lifetime listening to radio dramas, found tapes, published music and news broadcasts dated ONLY from the day BEFORE you were born and earlier…
Rummage
1 — a confused miscellaneous collection
2 — a thorough search especially among a confusion of objects
well, there’s already more material than you could get through in your lifetime- we are awash in the functionally infinite records of ourselves becoming ourselves… and every day there’s only more created and ever greater, faster access to that more that’s been created… and it seems we can no more drown in it than a fish can drown in ocean, but we can surely get lost in it the same way rain disappears into a river
Quilted
1 — as a blanket made from many pieces of fabric with a layer of cotton, wool, feathers, or down in between, all then stitched firmly together, usually in a decorative design
and in all of this, I’ve always been drawn to the way of rummaging, of wandering through these piles, troves, and catches of shadowed-echoes, our inheritance from worlds we’ll never actually know, full of the faces… hands… extinct scenery… defunct machinery… the ALMOST actual voices of the dead… shadow theater of unheralded lives and scripted lies… the stories that came before us and, inevitably, that inform, color, and flavor the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves… whether we realize it or not…
— Robb Tyler