Desiderium is a virtual reality experience centered around a speculative personal memory archiving service that eternalises your memories in the cloud. By creating a future for the archive that enables memories to be retained forever, the project reveals ways we currently memorialise people and objects. It also points to the volatility of digital material — how the digital, though often thought of as permanent, is still storage dependent and is therefore as finite as the analogue.

This project is a response to a year’s worth of Honours academic research into contemporary archival processes, manifested through a variety of iterative experiments in different forms and mediums ranging from product design, UX/UI design, web interactive experiences, AR and ultimately VR experiences. The interactive narrative experience invites participants to think critically about the memorialisation of people and objects in a digital landscape where the longevity of storage and memory is exploited by large corporate monopolies.