If you were asked to store your most valuable data… What kind information would you keep in 130Kb? Your usernames and passwords, your delicious tabs, a PDF with all your tweets, a map as a biography? Do you think this data would be valuable if mapping the genomic code of knowledge at this moment? It would be useful for anyone but you?
With this challenging question we start a publishing project in the intersection of technology and seed banking. Learn more about it after the break.
A floppy disk as a seed? In this sense the project is also a complaint, a call of attention on the temporality of the devices we use to keep our information.
Is all the information we keep really valuable? Aren’t we collecting data devices filled with useless junk DNA? What happens with our information if “the cloud” evaporates? Would we be able to rearrange key information combining it efficiently with matter and without wasting energy… just like nature does?
It’s possible that in the future, those basic info units from different seeds will be combined by data genetists in the hope to reestablish the genetic code of the ideas at this time. Maybe they will keep this basic units in other devices, into new kind of seeds.
There will be stored only 99 floppy seeds with submissions from guest contributors randomly combined with submissions from an open call.
Confirmed key contributors includes : Nahrain Al-Mousawi, Aristide Antonas, blogger @lelaissezfaire, Régine Debatty, DEMILIT [Brian Finoki, Nick Sowers and Javier Arbona], Pedro Hernández [La Periferia Doméstica], Rory Hyde, Pedro Gadanho, Joseph Grima, and Greg J. Smith, among others.
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Type of information ANY kind of file: Text, images, sound files (e.g. mp3), games, video. Please note that it has to fit into 130Kb. Any file surpassing such limit will not survive.
Please send your submissions using the subject | dpr.bcncom Timetable
- 01-30 November | CFS - 01-15 December | Review of gene submissions - 15th December | Announcement of selected information files - December 2011 | Genetic manipulation of floppy seeds - January 2012 | Liberation of floppy seeds. - February 2012 | Mapping of seeds according to their final destination. This map will be the tool to track the seeds and also the laboratory to exchange further information. …………………………………………………………
Speculate on what happens after we commit Media Euthanasia.
For updates check out #datathanatology on twitter.
PIC: Floppy Disk by 92wardsenatorfe
All images from Floppy Disk Retrospective [A gallery curated by @jolieodell]
