16 Gigabytes of Human Memory

premiered by JACK Quartet June 2023

Inspired by the relationship between human and digital memory, the idea of this piece came about when I was clearing out old SD cards and came across many images that I had forgotten about, from days I couldn't seem to place. Only remembering these days when encountering these images made me realize that photos—and other digital artifacts—often serve as a sort of external hard drive for human memory, letting us free up space in our brains without fully losing that data. While sorting through these SD cards, I saw pictures of my younger self, of my dog as a puppy, and of people who were dear to me at one point, people whom I am no longer in contact with… It astounded me how much of one’s life can be captured in just one 16-gigabyte SD card.