WORK: ARCHIVIST, BROKEN
self-initiated, 2024
ARCHIVIST, BROKEN is adapted from ARCHIVIST, an individual work from an unreleased series which was intended to be submitted into David Rudnick’s Tomb Series via the Recovery system (described here)
The unreleased series is titled “20 Evocations” after Bruce Sterling’s 1984 experimental short story “Twenty Evocations”, and is itself a kind of visual bootleg fan fiction, an alternate take on the concept of the Tomb Series.
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Sterling’s short story is written as sequence of twenty very brief sections, each no more than a paragraph or two, momentary flashes of experience spread across the protagonist’s life, each seemingly disconnected, but together building to a sense of a whole, an imprint of identity, memory — a hyper-compressed literary technology which acts as a way to experience this life on fast forward, and as an elegy as it ends at the conclusion of the text.
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David Rudnick’s Tomb Series is 177 illustrations of MiniDiscs, which each bear, though their visual variations, symbols, and titling and grouping into thematically connected houses, a token of Rudnick’s formative experiences, influences, and convictions. Rudnick has spoken about the desire to create works which act as vessels to cary forward those immaterial and sublime things to the future.
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20 Evocations, is like the Tomb Series made up of illustrations of obsolete hardware storage. Rather than MiniDiscs, this series depicts 5.2” magneto optical disks, an older family of formats chiefly used for archiving files in the days before abundant external hard drives. They are illustrated in 2D, in this case using vector drawings, gradients, simple effects, and some procedurally generated textures. The series was originally conceived before Recovery was even announced, intended to be distributed in the active (at the time) Tomb Series Discord server. Like the mother series, each of the 20 Evocations illustrations would reflect, explicitly or poetically, formative personal influences, deeply held values, fragments of thought evoking an unseen whole of the artists life.
When Recovery was announced, with its goal of creating a community governed platform of “culture building culture”, it lined up perfectly. ARCHIVIST, a disc which bore the emblem of the Tomb Council, was intended to celebrate this.
However, Recovery’s exciting and active beta launched just before a dramatic shift in the on-chain art landscape, the downstream cultural impacts of the colapse of various web3 organizations collapsing, leading to a dampening of activity and interest, and creating economic barriers to minting new work. When Recovery’s front end stopped functioning, the project and community seemed to go into a kind of hibernation.
ARCHIVIST, BROKEN as a piece of art is intended to express this moment — a storage device for the meaning condensed around the Tomb Series, damaged, functioning partially, producing artifacts when read and accessed, but, hopefully, still recoverable.
It is set to mint for free, as has become expected in this post - peak NFT moment, an edition of 177 to reflect the number of original Tombs.
The team behind Tomb Series has expressed the intention to bring Recovery back online, at which time the full series of 20 Evocations will hopefully be proposed and released.
[originally posted at Mirror]