Lost Thoughts and Abandoned Information

I often find myself contemplating the fate of my memories. As I get older, I spend more time trying to reclaim details of my past. Sometimes I hear a song that I listened to as a teenager and feel a sense of loss and sadness. This auditory cue triggers a sense of recollection but the memories are just out of reach, forcing me to come to terms with my own mortality. After my nostalgia wears off, I wonder where my memories go. Are they stuck in my head and I can’t reach them or have they left me completely? As an artist I am interested in the sense of loss that occurs with the realization that the information and memories that once made up the details of our lives are slowly slipping away and being replaced by new knowledge and new memories.

In my work I’ve conceptualized a world where misplaced thoughts and abandoned information exist after being dislocated from their original context. I use 1s and 0s, a reference to binary code, to represent accumulations of lost thoughts and abandoned information. The code of 0s and 1s is at once completely efficient (easily used by computers) and inefficient (it takes eight characters to represent the number one), and entirely incomprehensible to most people (myself included). Like much of the information we are confronted with everyday it is commonly recognized but understood by few. Like a lost memory it is familiar yet unattainable. The bug-like characters in my drawings process and rearrange the conceptual and visual information. Unlike us, they do not try to make sense of the code, but tenaciously engage in an endless task of processing and organizing the lost thoughts and abandoned information.
 

– Jen Erickson