we all speak at once (2025)

In 2006, I exhibited a work titled ‘Portable Memorial’, which was a book of souls for the internet age. It served as a record of deaths, broken dreams, failed enterprises, and the shifting currents of life online. The book listed 209,444 lapsed domain names from the period 16 May 2000 to 8 May 2001. Viewers were invited to highlight individual names as acts of remembrance.

When I began to create scrolls, I revisited the idea of text-based memorials. My aim was to evoke complex narratives through simple typographic means. The complexity is provided by generative/computational processes. I often use custom code and graphic software to redraw words repeatedly in layered compositions, producing dense asemic texts.

Applying this technique to another list of names felt like a meaningful act. I chose a list of 5,000 Holocaust victims, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, intended for name-reading memorial events. Each name is accompanied by either a country of origin or a known site of their death. In this work, the site names are redacted with black ink, allowing the memorial to communicate with minimal contextual framing.