Mineral Amnesia explores in sound the evolution and decay of the first erasable programable silicon memory. Encapsulated under quartz windows, made of pure crystal, EPROMS, now outmoded microchips, lose information once exposed to light. The installation salvages EPROMs from different generations and plays them in real time under discrete UV light until their sounds are eroded and disappear.

The project traverses the Digital Dark Age and its shadows through the perspective of an obsolete device. In 1971, researchers at Intel invented the Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, adjacent to the first Microprocessor. With their influx under techno-capitalism, computational power doubled every second year and accelerated even more so today, in pursuit of artificial intelligence. This exponential growth has caused digital information to be unretrievable, lost in old hardware bodies such as these EPROMS, and dumped to form toxic wastelands across the earth’s geological layer. 

From the 8k-bit capacity in the 2708 EPROM to the 1Mbit, the project reanimates these chips from the past and probes events from their genesis. Some EPROMs found programmed from the 70s transform the information into sounds, and some disclose voice tales. Light becomes an abrasive agent that consumes and distorts data slowly.