Mona Onyx (born June 14, 1987) is an American multidisciplinary artist, writer, and digital archivist known for her work at the intersection of memory, material culture, and speculative fiction. Her practice spans installation, net art, and hybrid print-digital publications. Early life and education Onyx was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of New Mexico (2009) and an MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2014). Work Onyx first gained recognition with The Fossil Record of a Refresh (2016), a web-based project that archived deleted Wikipedia pages as digital fossils—each “excavation” revealing the edit history and ideological battles behind removed entries. The work was acquired by the Rhizome ArtBase in 2017.
Her 2019 installation Elegy for a Hard Drive used shattered platters, magnetic dust, and forensic recovery software to reconstruct erased personal files from discarded electronics, raising questions about digital dispossession and ecological aftermath. mona onyx wiki