Storage and Memory

How do we preserve the spirit of this post-anthropocentric transformation? Teresa Fernández-Pellos’s *En Crypt II* offers an aesthetically brilliant answer by scaling up and staging storage and memory microchips on a larger scale. These designs, transformed into cryptic, ornamental wall objects, not only meticulously reflect technological progress in the micro realm but also deeply rooted cultural patterns. Viewed on a human scale, the structures of the chip architectures bear striking similarities to, for example, Art Deco ornaments, Polynesian motifs, Inca patterns carved in stone, or ancient hieroglyphs.

At the same time, the installation scrolls through a vast archive of public internet reviews encoded in binary code and visualizes them as signal-like patterns of on and off LED lights. Fernández-Pello thus raises the highly relevant question of whether human memories and experiences can be completely reduced to mathematical data and its compression—and which nuances of biological memory are irretrievably lost during the transfer to compact machine-based computer memory with its structural compression processes.