An exploration of memory, absence, and digital intimacy through ceramics as archive
Ceramics
documentation with no content
What Was That About? began from something simple and personal: I have a friend I often talk to on the phone. We’ve had so many conversations, but after each call, what I’m left with is just a timestamp and a duration on my call log.” Looking back, I realize I barely remember what we talked about. The record is there, but the content feels like it’s evaporated. This observation made me wonder: what do we really hold onto from these moments of connection? Technology keeps a trace, but it’s incomplete, fragmented, impersonal. And yet, looking at those timestamps, those fragments, I started to imagine: what were we talking about that day? what did that hour feel like? I realized that even these tiny, detached records could evoke memory, emotion, and imagination.
A screenshot from my phone, showing a fragmented call records. Each entry marks a moment—a missed call, a finished conversation, a silent notification. Together, they form a record of presence and absence, yet the actual conversations, emotions, and words are already fading from memory.
Ceramic has always been a material tied to permanence. Long before paper, long before digital archives, clay carried stories, transactions, memories.
In Mesopotamia, 3200 BCE, clay tablets were inscribed with cuneiform script to record trade and law. Ancient Greece transformed ceramic vessels into narrative objects, painting scenes of daily life, rituals, and legends onto their curved surfaces. Early accounting systems even sealed ceramic tokens inside clay envelopes as records—a way of fixing memory into matter. What fascinates me is: a material once used to make information endure across centuries is now met with something fleeting, instantly forgotten. By imprinting call durations, timestamps, incomplete fragments onto ceramic, ephemeral traces are caught in a medium meant to last. The result is a quiet tension: a permanent surface holding a temporary moment, a durable body preserving a fragile absence.
It makes me wonder: can a record preserve meaning, or does it only preserve its own existence? Is the trace enough, or do we always lose what was inside it?
Cuneiform tablet: administrative account with entries concerning malt and barley groats
ca. 3100–2900 BCE
Sumerian
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This tablet with early writing most likely documents grain distributed by a large temple. Scholars have distinguished two phases in the development of writing in southern Mesopotamia. Symbols stood for nouns, primarily names of commodities, as well as a few basic adjectives, but no grammatical elements. Such a system could be read in any language, but it is generally accepted that the underlying language is Sumerian. Nonetheless, even these later scribes rarely included grammatical elements, and the texts, created as memory aids, cannot be easily read today.
The title, What Was That About?, lingers like a quiet question: something we ask ourselves after a call ends, after a message disappears, after a conversation fades from memory. This work transforms incomplete records into a tactile archive. By materializing these fragments, I hope to invite viewers to reflect on their own conversations: to wonder what was said, what was left unsaid, and what was never meant to be remembered in the first place.
In this work, I linger in that silence and ambiguity. Each ceramic piece preserves a sliver of digital residue, yet paradoxically, it also erases access. What once could be replayed or respon-ded to is now permanently sealed. Ceramic has long been a medium for preservation, used to archive moments across centuries. But it is also delicate and fragile. It resembles our digital data: durable and transcient at the same time.
On a phone, this icon invites you to press, to listen, to replay. But once it’s documented onto ceramic, it’s permanently sealed——frozen in time, unreadable, unplayable. It makes me wonder: if we want to preserve something digital forever, what does “forever” even look like? How do we save something that was never meant to last?
This is a record I see often. Sometimes it’s just a small line of text like this, but behind it, there were hours
of conversation. I always wonder how much is held inside this one tiny speech bubble. How many words, emotions, stories have been condensed into something this small?
