Stone Age CD, 2024

Engraved stone
20 cm diameter

Moksha Richards is an Australian artist living in Berlin. This work’s genesis was a meme about the Rosetta Stone and, for me, has always carried a sense of irony and humour. Memes are a fascinating form of communication and a very elegant expression of human experience. They are responding to, creating and recording contemporary culture. The technology represented is an archaic one. A CD, already defunct. Totally transient in its usability – Technology is incredibly fast-paced and things quickly become redundant with CDs already returning underground. Connecting this to the Rosetta Stone I thought about how information is stored in physical matter, in these cases both carved into the surface of material, one in stone and writing, the other plastic, light and binary code. This led me to think about lost languages, and how the systems of communication we rely on today are just brief phases in a much longer evolutionary arc. Ultimately, our digital archives will persist in ways we cannot yet predict, and will one day become fragments of a lost era, requiring careful interpretation. Future humans will likely labour to decode them just as we now study the remnants of the ancient world.