The Figment Index is a living archive of “figments” — the small, fleeting proofs of experience that might otherwise be lost to time. It is not a journal in the traditional sense. Instead, it is an ongoing index of the minor figments that make up a life: a ticket stub, a square cut from a package, a photograph framed in negative space, a snippet of conversation.
What are Figments?
In this context, figments are the tangible and digital traces of lived experience — scraps, impressions, or moments that hover between memory and artifact. The word “figment” usually suggests something imagined, but here it signals something both real and elusive: evidence of what once happened, pared down to its most fragile form.
We chose figments as our nomenclature because it captures this duality. These items are not whole objects or comprehensive records; they are partial, suggestive, and open to interpretation. A figment may be small, but it points to something larger — a life, an encounter, a moment that can never be fully reassembled.
Why the Index?
Each figment is fragile on its own, but together they form a record of presence — proof that something once happened, that something once mattered. The Index gathers them into a shared structure, not to impose order, but to allow connections to emerge.
The Figment Index unfolds in both physical and digital form. Physical figments are squares of material cut from the objects of everyday life, while digital figments manifest as small photographs bordered in silence. Together, they blur the line between memory and artifact, between personal archive and shared cultural debris.
When is The Index Complete?
The Figment Index is not a finished collection. It is an evolving one — growing, reordering, and recontextualizing itself as new figments are added. Like memory itself, it is imperfect and shifting. What matters is not just the figment itself, but the act of noticing, indexing, and preserving it.
This is only the beginning. The Figment Index will continue to expand, weaving together the subtle traces that form the texture of lived experience.
