This research project begins with a personal collection of over thirty USB flash drives, which were discarded, donated, or found. Like a silent witness to past exchanges, forgotten tasks, or once-urgent transfers. While flash drives are designed for immediacy and convenience, their technological structure betrays a different temporality: the files they carry are often deleted, but not erased; forgotten, yet still residually present. Through the physical logic of NAND flash memory and the latency of deletion, the USB drive becomes a paradoxical object. Ephemeral in use, enduring in trace.

At the heart of this project is a question about the temporality of storage media: what kind of time does a flash drive hold? Unlike paper archives or cloud databases, the USB drive encapsulates a micro-temporality—designed for short-term use, yet haunted by long-term residue. A deleted file is not gone, only hidden, lingering in the circuitry until it is overwritten. This deferred erasure creates a space where personal digital traces, such as photos, documents, names, timestamps. They accumulate invisibly, awaiting rediscovery.

By excavating these drives using forensic tools and interpretive methods, the project approaches each as a fragmentary archive of individual lives. Most of these fragments are contextless: partial files, unnamed folders, broken images. Yet when viewed collectively, they begin to form a loose constellation, an accidental anthology of a generation’s habits, aesthetics, labor, and loss. What emerges is the speculative possibility of piecing together a form of collective memory not through coherent narratives, but through the repetition of patterns, the echoes of formats, and the shared infrastructures of digital life.

Methodologically, this work aligns with media archaeology, particularly its focus on heterogeneity, materiality, and temporal displacement. Following thinkers such as Kittler and Zielinski, the research resists linear media history, instead dwelling in the asynchronous layers of forgotten devices and failed formats. The USB drive, as an obsolete yet recoverable medium, embodies this layered time, where outdated technologies hold in their circuitry not only technical histories, but human ones.

Ultimately, the project asks whether it is possible to reconstruct a sense of collective memory from unrelated, anonymous remnants. Can the unintentional accumulation of digital debris across dozens of forgotten drives reveal something of a zeitgeist? Can the temporal gaps and material limits of storage media teach us not just how we remember, but how history itself is fractured, delayed, and scattered across devices designed to be temporary? In treating the USB drive as both artifact and actor, this project explores how technologies of deletion and delay open new paths for thinking memory, loss, and the politics of digital residue.