This issue of Crawlspace arrives in typical conditions: later than we had anticipated, pushed uphill past our many personal obstacles. These obstacles are usually unpredictable and unavoidable, and can feel almost mundane in the small-scale devastation of our personal worlds, especially when placed against a media backdrop that suggests an ever-increasing global fear and suffering.

Just as often, the delays of getting Crawlspace ready come down to many minute glitches: mismatched calendars, activities falling in the fault lines of a to-do list app. The more I outsource my plans to yet another software dedicated to help with planning, the less in touch I seem to be with any sense of what I’m supposed to be doing next.

These somewhat trivial challenges have me thinking about how we store and look after memories. The human brain is estimated to have a memory capacity equivalent to 2.5 million gigabytes, yet we lose something close to 90% of new information within a week of ingesting it. We are also adept at corrupting what few memories we keep: splicing separate events together, stitching false details into our pasts with ease. 

We turn to computers to store our memories for us, but digital memory seems just as fallible. Links rot in the soft tides of the internet, while cosmic radiation glitches devices from video game consoles to voting booths. Most dangerous it seems is the potency of digital memory to intentional and malicious acts of corruption: weeks before we write this editorial, the new US administration removed thousands of government webpages housing important health, environmental and scientific information. Without critical attention and support for our archives, our collective memory falls under attack, twisted to become fodder that validates imperial capitalist agendas.

The pieces in this issue each resonated with me for the way they reach through memories under glitch—in the self, in families, in cultures. There are works that blur in and out, both in a visual sense and also in poetic images that evoke the covering and uncovering of memory, in some cases as an intentional manifestation and others as an inevitable change, a current that moves through us like electricity.

We hope you enjoy this issue! We also think now is a great time to revisit the pieces in our back-issues, especially if you haven’t seen them before. As the archive of art on Crawlspace continues to grow, we feel a renewed sense of custodianship for the memories embedded within these web pages. Thank you, and we’ll see you again soon.