Decription:

When google searching the names of my father and his father online, what exists of the contemporary digital identies of these two men who died before the proliferation of the internet, are the books that they published. Books, being the information technology that predated the internet and which still abundantly live and circulate our present material world. Books, in this case, as ghosts of those past/passed, with voices very much still present.

My Armenian grandfather wrote the book, The History of Armenia, dedicating it to future Armenian generations, while drawing from ancient ones. In his preface he writes:

“These traits and characteristics of the [Armenian] race, developed through long years of variegated experiences, are inherited by the individual, who cannot discard them like a worn out garmet. A man’s actions, his capacity for ideas and ideals, and the formation of his character are determined to a great extent by this inheritance.”

I am the first in my family to return to Armenia since my grandparents left following the Genocide. I spent a year in the country seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, and being in the land that he describes in his book while writing a research report for AGBU, an organization of which he was a member. Upon returning to the United States, as a self designated care taker of his technological existence (or dare I say, existence). I scan and digitize his book and submit it to digital library archives all over the world. Of note is its submission into Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the Library of Alexandria), based in Alexandria, Egypt, where my grandparents met, and where my grandfather fought in the battle … . The Library has a digital collection called Digital Assets Repository, or DAR, which means home in Arabic.

Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Titles:

Endless Life

Endless Living

Deathlessness

A Day of Leisure is a Day of Immortality (Trinh T Minh-ha)