Summoning the ghosts of the AnArchive

Memorial Matter is an artistic research project that shows the strong material condition of our digital culture which is based on millennia-old layers of deep time, containing the writing of terrestrial life. It is this geological foundation that the archive of our collective memory is inscribed in, from ancient to contemporary data technologies. In the context of the Human-Machine Fellowship 2023 at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin, this investigation combines analogue film and digital technology, utilizing a found archive of 16 mm film from the Cold War era. The film images reveal the use of industrial technology to extract natural resources through mining and automatization as a vision and goal of progress. Using artificial neural networks and biomaterials, the progressive imaginaries of the 20th century were interpreted by an AI and transformed into 3D Sculptures out of leftovers from the carbon era.