Eternal September

HD video loop, 18:11, 2016

 

The term Eternal September refers to the moment the Internet lost its seasonal rhythm—when, in September 1993, AOL opened Usenet access to all subscribers. What had once been a cyclical influx of new university students each autumn became a never-ending flood. The Internet, once a stagnant pool with predictable ripples, was suddenly transformed into a raging river—its floodgates permanently opened, its waters endlessly renewed.

As a species, we have always fought against forgetting. Across the millennia, we’ve built monuments, drawn on cave walls, carved symbols in stone—all in an effort to preserve memory, to create a collective mnemonic prosthetic against the decay of time. The Internet is the latest version of this impulse: a vast, communal memory-machine that has fundamentally changed our experience of time. No longer a straight line, time on the Internet fragments and spirals—an omnidirectional explosion where past, present, and future collide in unpredictable ways. Time may still move remorselessly forward, but memory doesn’t always follow.

Sometimes, a shard of future memory cuts through the present. Sometimes, fragments of the past wash ashore, startling us with their sudden familiarity. The film attempts to tap into those bits of cultural sediment by tumbling through history like a flood moves through a ravine. Water cools the servers where our identities are stored; it carries our data across the aether just as it once carried our ancestors to new continents. The fluid networks that connect us, sustain us, and too often threaten to drown us.

It’s the same water that has always been here—the same that our ancestors drank, the same that our descendants will (hopefully) drink. Constant, yet ever-changing. Like the Internet, and memory. Like the new eternal now.

 

Direction, Animation, Sound, Editing:

Rustan Söderling