The latest release from Futurestates season 2 is “Digital Antiquities” directed by J.P. Chan. The film explores how technology makes it both easy and difficult to preserve digital memories. Here’s a synopsis of the short:

By 2036, data loss has become a thing of the past. All digital media is instantly uploaded to the internet and permanently stored in the cloud, safely backed-up on servers scattered around the world. Only a handful of small businesses in the world have the expertise to recover data from pre-cloud devices. On a hot summer day, a young man named Kai visits Digital Antiquities, a store in eastern Pennsylvania specializing in data recovery and sales of vintage electronics. He shows Cat, the store’s only employee, an old compact disc left to him from his deceased mother and asks her to recover its contents. Will Cat help him find a working CD reader? And what will they discover among the contents of the disc?

Also see other shorts from Futurestates Season 2 including Beholder and Remigration with Rick Yune. You might also recognize actress Jo Mei from the short films Empire Corner and Wu is Dead.

Digital Antiquities by J.P. Chan

behind the scenes of Digital Antiquities by J.P. Chan