I came across some artists who do a lot of archiving of digital ephemera, Mimi Bowman (@dallemimi) and Chainmail balaclava (@crisis.acting) and there is music/noise going on as well. I am always late to the party, Chainmail balaclava’s crisis mixes on Soundcloud are a lot of fun in a dark sort of way. I love the aesthetic and deep emptiness (with overflowing abundance) and I like it even more because of visual cues that are varied yet constant.

What gets me is the sheer amount of digging that has to be done to make work like these artists do. I do a little bit of digital digging myself and when I think about it I have done a lot over the years and so have we all but not for the sake of archiving it. Normally when I find something I want to use for art that is out in the digital junkyard I completely disfigure it and rarely keep the original image. 

I suppose most of the photographic archive I own (around a thousand photographs or more) are analogue and I occasionally digitise some here and there on a whim. Yet I could never imagine digitising everything and having a space just for that yet these two have grabbed material from the depths and made great videos, funny videos and all sorts of strange stuff.

What I like about these two artists is they inspire me without me feeling that I need to emulate or dig into their archive because I feel like they know my aesthetic field better than I do. It is just straight up inspiring and at times mesmerising. They make you feel sure of yourself because of some of the digital ephemera they use you have come across something like it or the exact same video or image at some point.

So their power is collective consciousness, the digital world is like the cinema bursting through the wires, I believe Deleuze coined the cinema as a giant conscious mind and now its running through everything with a billion plus authors. We are simply opening and closing our eyes and the light floods in anyway. All I can say is keep it coming.