The Beatles — Abbey Road (Side 1)

MEMORY HAS A MATERIAL

The Vinyl Series brings together two once-familiar formats—the vinyl record and the floppy disk—each created to store and circulate music, information and memory. In Abbey Road (Side 1), exactly ninety vintage 3.5-inch floppy disks form the surface of the work, surrounding a custom-cut aluminum center disc with a reimagined record label. Two technologies from different generations converge in a single object: the vinyl record, whose physical presence has endured for decades, and the floppy disk, once an everyday symbol of the digital age and now largely obsolete. Together, they transform Abbey Road into a physical archive of cultural memory.

 VINYL SERIES

The Beatles
Abbey Road
Side One

33 × 35.5 inches
Mixed media on vintage 3.5-inch floppy disks
2026

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ABBEY ROAD

Few album images have become as culturally embedded as Abbey Road. Released in 1969, the record occupies a particular place between music and visual memory: the crossing, the typography, the Apple label and even the physical object of the record itself have become recognizable well beyond the music they originally contained.

Abbey Road (Side 1) turns attention from the famous album cover to the record itself. Ninety vintage 3.5-inch floppy disks form the surface of the work around a custom-cut aluminum center disc, where Smith reconstructs and reimagines the visual language of a 1969 French pressing. The familiar green Apple label carries the six songs of Side 1—from “Come Together” and George Harrison's “Something” through the extraordinary closing weight of “I Want You (She's So Heavy)”—while original recording information and production details coexist with invented references to software, data storage and obsolete technology.

The result brings two different forms of recorded memory into direct contact. A vinyl record created at the end of the 1960s is reconstructed through floppy disks that came to define a later digital era, transforming a familiar object from music history into something materially and visually new.

STUDIO NOTES

Abbey Road is one of those rare albums whose visual identity has become nearly as recognizable as the music itself. I wanted this work to acknowledge that history without simply recreating the familiar album cover. Instead, I approached the record itself as the image, rebuilding it through vintage floppy disks and the visual language of another technological era.

The green Apple label immediately places the work within the world of The Beatles, but I wanted it to reward a much closer look. I developed the center label as an artwork within the larger work, beginning with a 1969 French pressing of Abbey Road. I reconstructed and reimagined its individual elements, allowing original recording information to coexist with newly composed references to floppy disks, data storage and obsolete technology. Typography, production details and even the perimeter text were considered individually, keeping the label recognizable while gradually revealing invented details.

I love the tension between these two technologies and the memories attached to them. For me, Abbey Road is particularly suited to the Vinyl Series because it exists at the intersection of music, design, technology and collective memory. The familiar record remains immediately recognizable, but its history has been rebuilt through an entirely different material language.