a pen to register

a pen to register explores the idea of the fallibility and loss of memory.

Purchasing a large number of obsolete floppy disks from eBay, Dawes planned to work with the contents found on the disks – hoping to find photos, letters, information, etc.

Instead, all the disks were empty.

Dawes instead began exploring the issues surrounding the modern archive – how much data we keep, what we value, and what we lose when the technology becomes super-ceded.

By using a non-archival pigment on an archival paper to make the drawing, Dawes infers that all our attempts to archive are fraught as technology’s rapid ascension parallels its own obsolescence, mirroring our own limited personal capacity to store and keep memories.

The work was shortlisted for the 2021 ANU Drawing Prize.