Digital storage mediums tend to be temporarily ubiquitous and quintessential —only to evaporate without a trace once a newer technology becomes widespread. The tiny USB thumb drives quickly conquered the two-decade dominance of “compact” discs, but with cloud storage and gigabit internet, we’re slowly witnessing their downfall too. I grew up using thumb drives for carrying and transferring data and looking back at my teenage years and youth, consider them an essential “medium” of causing information to travel.

 And while browsing through them to find something, sometimes, you would bump into a file from long ago that sent you back to that other time or experience, the way objects can cause you to time-travel and get lost in a moment that now makes up a rather distant block in your past: a unit of memory you rarely consciously think about, or even have deliberately buried deep down, but is easily and momentarily retrieved through a reaction you have no control over.

 In my recent pieces that shaped like USB thumb drives, I have tried to use certain materials, aesthetics, stylistics and designs to mimic such a memory effect. By using material such as hair strands, leaves, …. These pieces aim to act like units of memory themselves and at the same time contain sublime references to a cherished yet buried memory that will be instantly summoned.