Rosary
Inspired by Robert Walser’s microscripts, Rosary follows the systematic collection over the past decade of ‘spam’ names retrieved from junk email. The work is a memorial both to the transience of our lives and the absurdity of our self-importance.
Collected in a specimen case and labeled for posterity these fossil-like scraps of paper bear the names of identities which never quite made it beyond the digital world. Encased in wax they gain a fragile physicality that supercedes their former selves – an act of transubstantiation from the virtual to the real. As memorial inscriptions they may be read like a prayer, a meditation on impermanence. As identities they are merely scraps of paper.
