Fossil
Long-term file storage drive
2019 — 2020
Fossil is a collection of file storage drives for the far future. F20 (pictured below) is a portless synthetic stone smartphone-sized monolith for storing 20 of your most precious files. The F20 Fossil drive was designed to store a limited number of files, forcing its user to decide what is most precious to them and what they'd like to store for decades or centuries. In our age of endless information and infinite cloud storage, Fossil asks what digital information you find essential, and what you might want to hold onto or pass down as a physical/digital heirloom in the future.
While only one concept is presented here, Fossil is intended to be a collection of file storage objects—ranging from a single-file-storing charm to the monolith below for 20 files to an amphora-like vessel for hundreds of files. See Fossil process work here.
The F20 Fossil drive was produced by casting colored resin into a single layered block (the texture of which references the lithostratigraphy of ancient geological sediments). The block was then refined, sanded, scanned, retouched and finally used to texture the 3D model presented above.
The Fossil collection is about materiality more than anything else, concreting digital information into a recognizable raw material (the cast rock-like resin) that then becomes synonymous with information storage (much the way layers of rock in the Earth's crust contain information about the past).
The entire exterior of the drive is composed of one material, etched with a few simple graphics that describe its use. For production, a single block of material is milled hollow and fitted with a custom flash drive. The single milled hole in the device is then capped with another piece of similarly cast resin, resulting in a water-tight file storage drive. Files on the device are accessed via Bluetooth when the subtly-concave bottom side of the device is placed onto a subtly convex crushed-velvet-covered doc (in development).
See the process work page for some additional information about this project, process images, and concept sketches.
Design, concept development, formal development, resin casting and shaping, retouching, 3D modeling, preliminary rendering, and creative direction by me; 3D art and final rendering by Fahredin Kosumi.
