Speculative Archaeologies -Digital in Jojo Zan’s The Digital Amber

Date: 01/07/2025

Writer: Ben Vickers

London, UK

Jojo Zan, a London-based digital fashion artist and designer trained at the Royal College of Art, constructs a critical inquiry into the intersection of technological evolution, environmental decay, and material memory. Her project The Digital Amber articulates a speculative framework for understanding the future of human relics in the post-digital era—an age marked by the dematerialization of identity and the exponential growth of virtual space. Through an innovative combination of AR, VR, and sustainable 3D printing technologies, Zan interrogates what remains when the body becomes data and presence is mediated by digital infrastructure.

At the core of Zan’s work lies a provocative question: “If the end of human civilization no longer results in physical ruins, but instead in scattered fragments of data floating in the cloud, then how must archaeological tools evolve?” This notion of “future archaeology” anchors her artistic research, positioning wearable objects as “cultural interfaces” that archive the impermanence of both memory and matter. The Digital Amber reconfigures jewelry and fashion accessories not as ornamental artifacts, but as epistemological tools—embodied vessels for the transmission of temporal, ecological, and technological histories.

The Relic Girls Ring exemplifies this approach. Developed from two VR-sculpted avatars, the piece features a miniature head encased in translucent resin, her hair flowing upward like a fossil suspended in amber. “They are personifications of the physical body that humanity has discarded,” Zan notes, foregrounding the tension between corporeal presence and virtual abstraction. Crafted from biodegradable resin, the ring continues to erode over time, performing a slow degradation that metaphorically aligns with the disappearance of embodied identity in digital space. “Decay is not an end but rather a process of transformation,” she asserts. “It acts as a warning, representing everything that humanity has abandoned in its quest to enter and realize a digital world.”

Her use of chainmail structures—particularly in the Amber Chain series—further explores this dialectic between the ancient and the futuristic. Employing advanced 3D-printing techniques to produce flexible, interlinked units, the accessories echo the form of medieval armor while retaining a soft, tactile materiality. “I intentionally create this sense of ambiguity,” Zan explains. “The chain-like structures visually resemble armor, but when worn, they are soft… it both protects and restricts you. It is both an ornament and a burden.” The result is a wearable paradox: a porous shield that simultaneously invites touch and critiques the fragility of contemporary existence.

The Erosion Crown, inspired by fossil forms and skeletal remains, extends these concerns into the symbolic domain. Constructed with bone-like geometries and veil components, the piece references themes of extinction, inheritance, and epistemic weight. “The crown embodies the rise and fall of species in nature,” Zan states. “A question lingers: can humanity bear its weight?” Here, the artist positions ornament not as luxury, but as an emblem of anthropocenic consequence—underscoring the entanglement between technological advancement and ecological exhaustion.

Zan’s material decisions are as conceptually rigorous as her thematic inquiries. Utilizing bio-based, compostable materials such as PHA, she confronts the contradiction between high-tech fabrication and sustainable ethics. “Advanced technology is essentially a tool,” she reflects. “At the same time, it also creates pollution and waste. That’s why I use biodegradable materials… the use of such materials becomes a part of the language of my work.” This conscious entwinement of ethics and aesthetics reinforces the political charge of her practice, wherein material itself becomes an agent of critique.

Ultimately, The Digital Amber articulates a poetic yet urgent meditation on time, entropy, and digital residue. Jojo Zan’s work destabilizes the boundary between fashion and artifact, offering instead a vision of wearable knowledge—objects that carry the weight of lost bodies, collapsed histories, and speculative futures. As she concludes: “The so-called ‘future civilization’ is actually a continuation of ourselves… only the choices we make now can shape a better future.”