Purple Rain (Side 1)

MEMORY HAS A MATERIAL

Before music became an invisible stream, it was carried through objects. Records accumulated fingerprints, softened sleeves and associations with particular rooms, people and moments. Floppy disks promised a different kind of permanence, storing writing, photographs, work and correspondence inside objects that now survive even when their contents can no longer be accessed.

In Purple Rain (Side 1), those two forms of memory occupy the same surface. The album belongs to a shared cultural history, while the individual disks carry anonymous and largely inaccessible histories of their own. Their labels, scratches, colors and handwritten notations remain visible beneath the composition, allowing evidence of previous lives to persist within a widely recognized image.

The work does not attempt to recover what the disks once contained. Instead, it preserves their physical presence and asks what happens when a technology designed to store memory becomes a memory itself.

 VINYL SERIES

Prince & The Revolution
Purple Rain
Side One

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

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PURPLE RAIN

Few albums have entered cultural memory as completely as Purple Rain. Released in 1984, the record became inseparable from the film, Prince’s visual identity and an extraordinary world of violet light, theatrical intensity, vulnerability and excess. Its title no longer describes only an album or a song. It evokes an entire atmosphere.

In Purple Rain (Side 1), that familiar world is reconstructed through another defining technology of the 1980s. Ninety vintage 3.5-inch floppy disks form the surface of the work, surrounding a custom-cut aluminum center disc. The disks remain visibly individual beneath the larger composition, allowing their seams, labels, colors and traces of previous use to become part of the image.

The work brings together two parallel histories of the decade: the emotional spectacle of popular music and the rapid arrival of personal computing. One technology carried music into collective memory; the other stored private information that has largely become inaccessible. Joined together, they transform Purple Rain from a nostalgic image into a material archive of how identity, technology and culture are staged, recorded and remembered.

STUDIO NOTES

“I wanted the purple in this work to behave as more than a background color. I deliberately selected vintage floppy disks in a wide range of purple tones—from pale violet and lavender to deep plum—so that the material itself would give physical meaning to the album’s title. The color needed to feel electric in some areas and velvety and atmospheric in others. I also wanted enough of the disks’ original colors, labels and markings to remain visible so that the surface would never become a seamless reproduction. The tension between Prince’s theatrical visual world and the mechanical floppy-disk grid is what gives the work its energy.

This album and the tour also carry a deeply personal memory for me. I saw Prince perform Purple Rain at an outdoor concert while rain was actually falling around us. I have never been able to separate the song from the experience of standing there in the rain as Prince performed it. Everyone in the audience seemed to understand the enormity and extraordinary serendipity of that moment while it was happening. That memory remained at the front of my mind as I worked on this piece in the studio, influencing both its atmosphere and its emotional intensity.”