Hotel California (Side 1)

MEMORY HAS A MATERIAL

Hotel California is one of those recordings that has moved beyond the album itself to become part of a shared cultural memory. Its imagery—California, escape, excess, beauty, unease—can feel familiar even to people encountering it decades after its release.

Here, that memory is reconstructed through another increasingly distant artifact: the 3.5-inch floppy disk. Once an ordinary container for information, the disk now carries its own associations with a particular moment in technological history. Arranged by hand and transformed through paint, image, and material, these obsolete objects become a physical structure for remembering something else.

The work brings two forms of memory together: the music we continue to carry with us and the technologies we once trusted to carry information for us.

 VINYL SERIES

The Eagles
Hotel California
Side One

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

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HOTEL CALIFORNIA

Released in 1976, Hotel California became one of the defining albums of its era, with its title track transforming the idea of California into something more complicated than a destination. The promise of escape, beauty and reinvention is shadowed by excess, disillusionment and the sense of entering a world that may be more difficult to leave than expected.

Over time, the album has become larger than its original moment. Its title, imagery and songs remain embedded in popular culture, allowing Hotel California to function almost as a remembered place—one constructed as much through music and collective imagination as through geography.

STUDIO NOTES

For this work, I wanted the center disc to feel immediately familiar without simply reproducing the original album artwork. The sunset gradient, silhouetted palms and architecture draw from the visual mythology surrounding Hotel California, while the typography and archival language recast the album as something preserved and retrieved from another technological era.

Around it, the floppy disks carry fragments of their own histories—commercial software, handwritten notes, music, games, travel and obsolete data. Some are recognizable and others nearly anonymous. Together they create an accumulated field of information and memory around an album that has itself survived as a cultural artifact for nearly half a century.