Monument

Monument is a sculpture which acts as a memorial for those who have passed away on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Each custom vinyl record associated with the piece contains the entire Facebook timeline of a friend of the artist who has passed away. By converting digital media into the analogue format of sound, the artist hopes to preserve the digital profiles and memories of those who have passed away online in a more tangible format. He also seeks to liberate these memories and profiles from corporate ownership and present data in a more human fashion in order to question what sort of cultural rituals and services surrounding death will come about with the advent of new technology? 

Each record in Monument I is encoded with text that has been converted into audio tones using frequency shift keying, a process similar to how a modem works. This process allows large amounts of data to be stored in audio tones and etched into a vinyl record. Custom software within the sculpture decodes these audio tones into text, which is then displayed on the front of the Monument. The music heard from the monument is created by sentiment analysis, a process by which each text post is parsed for emotional tone and converted into a series of musical notes based on whether the writer's attitude towards a particular topic is positive, negative, or neutral. Monument I allows us to re-visit memories of those who have passed away online in the real world, on a physical sculpture, as if we were reading a personal journal or listening to a story told by an old friend. 

Monument I was created as part of Gabriel Barcia-Colombo's "Hereafter Institute" a year long project investigating death in the digital age funded by the A+T Lab at LACMA