Yujia Xie

"To Be Stored"

Section MS2, Hope Pearl Strickland

Keywords: film, archives, memory

To Be Stored imagines a near future where humans no longer exist through their physical bodies but instead exist as data extracted from them. In this work, a USB becomes an entry point into an archiving system that turns a person into files. Within this world, the physical self, the mind, and memory are understood as forms of information that can be translated and stored. Glitches and terminal prompts appear as signs of a system working and processing.

Rather than telling a story, the work builds a speculative world through procedure. It presents archiving as something calm, ordinary, and even efficient, and leaves the viewer with a single question: If body, mind, and memories can all be stored, which means data replaces presence, what happens to presence, and what are you?