The volatile nature of internet culture poses a great risk to the preservation of its heritage. Conventional cultural works currently considered valuable by government bodies find themselves assimilated into experimental archives like Project Silica. To ensure the data's survival for millennia, such storage mediums must be non-magnetic, non-volatile and resilient to atmospheric conditions like light or moisture. One of the ways these conditions are met, is by encoding data into glass slides using volumetric laser etching.
Cultural products of the internet currently seem indestructible and ever-present, yet just one event such as a geomagnetic storm could instantly wipe them out of existence. Since these future relics are not regulated by people in power but spread organically through all users, they form an important element to consider as a key to understanding cultural works from today by future generations.
The project aims to bring attention to this issue, by using similar techniques to cement various meme trends into glass slides. The images are engraved directly, opposed to being encoded in voxels, to ensure they can be decoded even in a case of a loss of relevant technology. The installation poses as the golden records of internet imagery.
