The digital dark age is coming.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012 at 6:39AM LOST MEMORIES (French, English Subtitles) from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo.
There will be a day in the future when all we have in digital storage will be destroyed. Our children or our children’s children will look back at this time and wonder… “what were they really like?, They didn’t seem like they really had all that much to keep and to save.”
My grandfather was born in 1899. One day about 10 years ago I was at my office which was in the same building that my father ran his contracting business out of. My dad was in the storage room rumaging thru some old boxes. He pulled out a folder of old things that had belonged to his dad. In it was a piece of typing paper that had been folded over vertically then once horizontally to create a small ‘booklet’ about the size of a greeting card.
It had been fed thru a typewriter and on the front face it read, “Dear Laurence…”. The front page was filled, then when you opened the ‘little card’ it had a page 2 and and a page 3 and when you turned it over it had a page 4. Some one had carefully plotted out how to continue to flip and flop this piece of paper thru the typewriter and get all of this letter carefully placed on it.
It was a love letter between my grandfather and a young girl he had met at summer camp. They had kept in contact with each other and here it was, in this box in this store room nearly 100 years after it had been written. Although it was not my grandmother it was still amazing to hold this in my hand.
How many of your text messages will be read by your grand children in 100 years. How many of your emails will servive the decades. How many of your Facebook posts will be around in a century.
We are living in the digital dark ages. We just don’t know it yet.
PS… I LOVE this short film… its BRILLIANT.
Here is a breakdown of how the piece was created.
LOST MEMORIES, Visual Effects Breakdowns from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo.
Reader Comments (2)
Today, I continue to get panic calls from VHS viewers experiencing tape drop-outs with pleas to "save-to-disk" what appears to be vanishing before their eyes. Yet, when the burned images eventually take their turn at disappearing from oxidized DVDs, where else do we turn without Polaroid or paper ? More than ever I am convinced that our present age is but a "convenient intermediary" between the here and now and eternity, where all will be eventually revealed. All that is needed is making the right choice on the "codec for eternity" .