Archiving Economic Afterlife: A Dialogue Between 3D Scanning and Drawing

The chapter explores the afterlife of mass-produced collectibles - Snoopy toys from 1999 McDonald's Happy Meals. Distributed globally, they attracted collectors who believed in their future economic value and fans for whom they held personal significance. Today, after 25 years, these once-coveted Snoopy toys are abandoned and sold in flea markets, car boot sales, and via online marketplaces for second-hand goods.

The work is focussed on an artist-made digital archive of 3D scans of these toys acquired from sellers and collectors across Hong Kong, the UK, Russia. The 3D models were reworked through creating custom textures, which attempt to highlight the gaps, mistakes, and absences in the economic environment around these objects and the patchy, changing, irregular, disappearing personal stories behind them.

We argue that exclusion of such objects from the mainstream consumerist cycles generates poetic absences that endow these objects with subversive potential. With their existence within an alternative mode of economic circulation, they challenge capitalist consumer behaviours and open up possibilities to reconnect with these objects, re-use them more poetically and more personally, also highlighting the potential of absence, mistake, and glitch in the processes of archive-making.