Rumours (Side 1)

MEMORY HAS A MATERIAL

1984 arrived at a moment when music, technology and visual culture seemed to be accelerating all at once. Van Halen’s landmark album captures that collision perfectly—analog excess meeting the emerging digital age. Built from vintage floppy disks and centered on one of rock’s most instantly recognizable record labels, the work brings those two histories together. The disks themselves become artifacts of the same era: objects that once represented the future, now carrying the memory of it.

 VINYL SERIES

Van Halen
1984
Side One

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

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1984

Van Halen’s 1984 belongs to that rare group of albums that immediately evokes a time, a sound and an attitude. Released at the intersection of rock spectacle and a rapidly emerging digital culture, the album feels inseparable from the technology, graphics and visual language of its era.

In this work, the familiar 1984 label is enlarged and reimagined at the center of a field of authentic vintage floppy disks—many carrying their own handwritten notes, obsolete software labels and traces of previous lives. Gold leaf surrounds the circular composition, shifting with the light and giving the discarded technology an unexpected sense of permanence and value. Smith completely recreates the album center label, moving the smoking angel child from the album cover to now be placed on the vinyl center disk along with other references to the 1980s era of technological progress.

The result is both a tribute to an iconic record and an archive of the period that produced it: music and technology preserved together as material memory.

STUDIO NOTES

I was truly a young person of the 1980s. I went to Van Halen concerts, watched MTV when music videos still felt like an entirely new language, and was completely immersed in the music, fashion, technology and visual culture of that moment. 1984 doesn't feel like history to me. It feels lived.

That's part of what makes these old floppy disks so meaningful as a material. They came from the same world. At the time, they represented something incredibly modern—the future arriving in plastic squares—just as MTV, synthesizers and music videos were changing how we experienced music and popular culture.

Now the disks are obsolete, covered with handwritten notes, old software labels, scratches and evidence of other people's lives. I love bringing those artifacts together with an album I remember so vividly. The gold background transforms them again into iconic gold records hanging on a wall, but it doesn't erase their age or imperfections.

For me, 1984 is about more than remembering Van Halen. It's about remembering what it felt like to be young when all of this was new.