Forgotten Digital Artifacts

Forgotten Digital Artifacts is a de facto virtual reality exhibition space that interfaces old technology with the new, allowing users to explore and interact with the digital landscape of the late 1990s to early 2000s. For many, myself included, the epoch roughly spanning Windows 95 to Windows XP had an incredible and formative impact on how we navigate, understand, and relate to technology, computational systems, and the web.

The exhibition is comprised of three rooms, each of which engages with a different aspect of the early digital desktop experience and seeks to evoke a sense of nostalgia, frustration, playfulness, or some combination of the above. The primary room, largest in size, is closest to a representation of a physical desktop space, littered with crumbled files, a recycle bin, folders, the Internet Explorer icon, archaic computers, and even an ominous nod to early surveillance monitoring systems– a dialogue between past and present. While the user is free to clean up the landscape (i.e., putting the crumbled files into the recycle bin), much of the destructiveness of the early digital world (e.g., “delete system32”) is implicitly encouraged in Forgotten Digital Artifacts, and made possible by the new-age medium of VR, in which the user can actively destroy the desktop by grabbing, throwing, and launching the files, folders, and objects into disarray.

The remaining two rooms immerse the user in other core elements of the early Windows experience, including the blue screen of death, seemingly indomitable pop-ups, minesweeper, solitaire, and so on. Ultimately, the user emerges from the exhibition into a desert terrain in the middle of nowhere– a speculative and tongue-in-cheek representation of void virtual space, where old and forgotten digital artifacts can be found suspended in digital perpetuity.

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ESC to escape, R to restart