WeMissIPRES: A Mirror For Remembering

Alex May introduced A Mirror For Remembering at the WeMissIPRES programme of online talks, organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition, in September 2020. He spoke on 22 September in the Best of Digital Preservation 2020 stream, presenting a virtual reality artwork built around the long-term care, legibility, and survival of digital artefacts.

The talk positioned the work within a field that usually approaches preservation as a technical or institutional problem. A Mirror For Remembering shifts that discussion into an experiential form, using scanned museum objects, storage media, and virtual environments to ask what it means to keep a digital object accessible over time. In that context, the WeMissIPRES presentation connected the artwork directly to practitioners already thinking about preservation infrastructure, archives, and future access.

For May, the event made clear how closely the work sits to the wider practice. Questions of memory, mediation, and what technology allows us to retain or lose are central across the work, and here they were addressed through a project designed from the outset with preservation built into its structure. The talk brought those concerns into a public professional conversation at a moment when digital access had become newly urgent.