You know you’ve had an interesting few days when you finally get round to sorting through the bag you’ve been lugging around and pull out a collection of paper fragments: receipts, train tickets, wristbands, programmes,
contact cards.
When I met my partner in 1996 and finally ventured into his teenage bedroom, one of the things that endeared him to me was that the door was covered in cinema tickets, passport photos and gig stubs. I still have the scrap of paper he gave me, torn from the back of his A-level Chemistry notes, with a hand-drawn map showing me how to get to his house to watch a band rehearsal.
In a time of increasing digitisation, it makes me wonder what artefacts will remain. Will we lose paper and pen? Hastily scribbled notes? Tiny shreds of evidence that tie us to the places we’ve been and the people we’ve met?
More than that, in a digital world increasingly populated by GPT-edited algolit*, will we lose the looser, more inconsistent, rambling forms of expression that reflect different ways of thinking?
An ode to ephemera: a recollection of my experience at Voidspace Live 2026
SIDE NOTES:
Some things on this page are clickable,
others are not.
I didn't write about everything I saw,
neither did I experience everything.
I write from my perspective, which is an
artist/maker, and as such
attempts to talk about what I observed
and what questions it provoked, rather than a judgement of quality or relevance as art.
The page design was inspired by Irina Tsokova's piece ROOTS
Click on the objects to uncover observations and reflections
Algolit (n.)
A developing corpus of writing shaped by the language patterns of LLMs such as ChatGPT: literature influenced by algorithmic editing, where human writing begins to adopt the smoothness, structures and stylistic habits of AI-generated text.