AoIR Friends! Conference Attendees! Do you have some old floppy disks, zip drives, dumb smartphones, or other weird and wonderful carriers of unreadable data? If you’re packing your bags to come to AoIR in Montreal, we invite you to bring some of this ’stuff’ to donate** material to the Museum of Random Memory’s Shrine to Lost Data. What’s the Museum of Random Memory? It's a series of experiments in the public sphere to explore and critique everyday practices of creating future memories through digital archiving. At AoIR, we’re holding one of these exhibitions — which includes a Shrine to Lost Data — as an experimental session. On Friday, Oct 12, between 4-8:00 p.m., you can bring your offering to The Shrine !!! Meanwhile, over the next few days, we’ll be gathering your stories, images, and sounds, which we’ll use in Friday’s event to remix, remediate, recycle, or otherwise mess around with, to focus on the connections between the elusive materiality of data storage, personal memory, digital decay, dispreservation, and data loss. ALSO at this session, you’ll get to enjoy a live show by the fabulous DJ Ripley (AKA Larisa Kingston Mann, who will be remixing some of the audio pieces that have been donated by conference-goers in the next few days. You’ll see a flyer in your AoIR conference bag to learn more about this event, but for now, it's time to dig into your cupboards, look in the back of your drawers, take the lid off the shoebox, clear the cobwebs from the corners of your garage, or otherwise find some things to donate to our Shrine. See you soon in Montreal! Annette on behalf of the MoRM team, including Larisa Mann, Gabriel Pereira, Ramona Dremljuga, Mórna O’Connor, Justin Lacko, Elyzabeth Holford, Dalida Maria Benfield, Sarah Schorr, Sava Saheli Singh, Erin Macleod, Kat Tiidenberg, Elizabeth Whitney, and Ann Light. With many thanks to Foulab Montreal Hackerspace, Stef Duguay, and Concordia University. Learn more on https://www.larisa-mann.com/ https://futuremaking.space/morm http://museumofrandommemory.com **if you want it back afterwards, that’s entirely possible, but why would you?