An Archive Of The Mind

The new Jacob Geller video dropped a few days ago, and as I listened to it while working on a much-procrastinated commission, I found that it resonated with me a lot more than I had initially expected...

The way it applied to my way of thinking, to the obsessive hoarding of archives and information I've indulged in for years… It almost made me interpret my habits in a rather ludicrous light…

Around a year ago, I started writing a diary on my phone. The application, still synchronised with my Google account, kept various diary entries from years ago when I told myself that "This time I'll actually commit to writing a diary!!", only for me to make a couple of entries for a week or two, and inevitably forgetting about it.

I'm around my 346-day streak as of writing this, in a couple of weeks it will mark a year since I successfully managed to commit to a whole year of being on my phone before going to sleep and writing down everything I did, from my mood of the day, what activities I participated in, what image I can use to represent it. An excerpt, or a blip in my life, written down, immortalized for as long as the app continues to exist.

Days ago, I got a notification from my diary app, about checking out a Memory. A diary entry from 2019.

I went to vote, then spent time with my partner at the time to watch She-ra. An ex-friend blocked me out of jealousy for the time I was spending with someone other than them. And I was crying about it, conflicted, blaming myself for being such a horrible person for daring to have boundaries.

A blip that would have faded into the tangled blur of traumatic memories that comes from an incapability of processing the things that I went through. Were it not for myself 4 years ago, whose only outlet to deal with stress was writing, choosing to write down the activities of that specific day, which would have otherwise been lost to time.

And that makes me think back to my 346-day streak.

Every day of the year, written down in detail when I know I'm so prone to forgetting things, the urge to archive as many things as possible when the information is stored in something as unreliable and fragile as a human brain.

For the longest time, I've had a passion for archiving my work, it was and continues to be the goal of this website to be a collection of all the art I've ever made, like I had opened my brain up and dumped it all into separate Vaporwave themed webpages for the world to see. Countless blips of my life, all displayed for public entertainment as I willingly deprive myself of privacy out of a desire to be seen, to be understood.

If I can archive everything, if I can display everything, if I can provide intricate detail behind every stroke, every word, every decision, then that means that people will be one step closer to seeing me. To understanding. To maybe help me feel less alone in my ventures.

And truly, behind this hoard of information, do the important things not get hidden? In 346 diary entries, how many of those contain actually relevant events while others describe my days as monotonous and repetitive when I'm often too depressed to exist or follow any of the passions that make up what I am?

Around the years 2010-2012, I was starting out with my digital art, using an old laptop to do so. It was the beginning of my Vocaloid phase, and one of my passions at the time was recreating the music videos and redrawing them with my OCs. I had also archived a lot of webcomics from my DeviantArt days, going through DeviantArt pages and saving the pages one by one on my computer, so that if something ever happened to the wifi, I'd have these comics to read in order to pass the time.

Later in that years, we started having computer problems, and without as much as warning me, my family had formatted that old laptop, being under the outdated belief that that would fix it.

And with that, my files were gone. The earlier concept art of my Drimare OCs that hadn't seen the light of day, my animations, my webcomic archives, the countless movie maker videos mimicking the Vocaloid music videos I was obsessed with, and dozens of RPG Maker games and experiments, cutscenes, dialogues and character sprites, all gone without a trace.

Anything that hadn't been previously posted to DeviantArt or Facebook or Youtube was lost, a lot of those old webcomics were deleted by their creators, and I often find myself mourning the loss of those works, that now only get to exist as a vague memory in the back of my mind. If my life had an iceberg of lost media, this stuff would be there.

I often pinpoint this loss as the source of my almost neurotic obsession with archives. Nowadays everything I make is religiously backed up and saved everywhere, artwork gets posted in the highest definition possible, and cross-posted in as many places as I have the energy to do. My old DeviantArt pictures exist both on this website and also in an old Blogspot blog, as when I did my DeviantArt purge back in 2015, I was horrified by the prospect of forever losing any of the artwork I was deleting, that I had to immediately repost it as soon as possible.

And the video above said something along the lines of "What distinguishes a hoard from a collection, is the value that someone else can find in it.". And looking at my pictures and my archives, I wonder where my work falls into. I wonder if the value that I find in it justifies me filling a hard drive with countless .sai and .psd files that haven't been opened in years when I have the original artwork saved in image format just fine. "What if I lose the image?", "What if a file gets corrupted?", "What if I need the original layer with the sketch?" truly the chances of me ever needing that again are so incredibly low.

"But never zero", my mind says. I nod in agreement and continue hoarding .sai files. Certainly, they'll come in handy sOME DAY. (They won't.)

This obsession with archives comes as second nature by now, I never questioned it. Keeping track of things reminded me that I exist, that I do things, that whenever I think "I didn't do anything today" because I'm so wired to think of myself as useless and my work as worthless, I can look at the things I tracked down and counter my brain with evidence of how I did do things, I advanced projects even if the most minimal way. Is that anything? In the great scheme of things, are all these diary entries and archives and collections anything?

Who am I doing this for? Who is watching? Am I my only audience? Are these archives of the past taking away the time I could be spending working in the present?

I've often jokingly called this website an attempt at writing an autobiography, but truly, are all these intricate details necessary? Does it matter to anyone other than myself?

Despite my ineptitude at math, I often found myself drawn to certain mathematical and abstract concepts in relationship to infinity. The fourth dimension, tesseracts, multiverse theory, fractals, mirrors... A particular example that comes to mind is that of the Library of Babel.

A library said to contain every book that can, was and would be written. And every variation, every derivative word makes a new book. As such, most books are nothing but incomprehensible gibberish, and in the unlikely chance that someone were to find something coherent, who's to say that that information was even correct or valuable when infinite variations of that book are implied to exist?

It's like infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, each filling infinite shelves of this library with their incomprehensible words. Like multiverse theory but through books?

The archivist in me finds the idea so utterly compelling and fascinating, and rather than acknowledging the bizarreness of the whole concept, instead, I find it... inspiring.

Archive everything.

A journal with all my unfinished drafts and revisions, a gallery with every sketch and linework and edit I've ever done. I once even considered doing a League of Legends Patch Notes type history for my original characters, pointing down the date and writing down every single way their design or story was updated, lest I too were to forget this.

I do wonder if this is related to my hyperfixation tendencies and special interests… I'm most certain that it is… When I fixate on characters, I feel like I need to have as much information about them as humanly possible. A Two Cakes type of situation even. How happy I'd be to know to most insignificant hyper-specific details of everything, the thing's entire history and as much information on it as I can properly absorb.

And when my hyperfixations tend to so commonly fall on my own characters and my art, with it follows the tendency to gather as much information as possible. A hoard of files and documentation that has little value to anyone else, but to me, it's so filled with value and importance.

And as niche as it can get…

Who else could I count on to make an archive of my mind?