If you were asked to store your most valuable data... What kind information would you keep in 1.35 Mb? 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.

Nature solves all its challenges with an efficient combination of matter and information, activated by inputs of energy. With this project we are going to rescue ancient seeds... in a crude attempt to imitate nature. We are going to keep and spread those units of information into square shaped seeds: a series of floppy disks.

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?
As recent studies of genomic information reveals, the complexity of an organism doesn’t depends on the number of its genes, but in the way it combines them. This publishing project aims to keep essential information from forward thinkers into a floppy seed, which is also subjected to degradation. Even it can hardly be inserted in our current digital hardware ground! What if there is someone who can still extract the information and store on a device with different materiality?

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 [genes of 130kB] from guest contributors randomly combined with submissions from an open call. Key contributors and submission guidelines will be announced soon!

We are speculating on what happens after we commit Media Euthanasia.

For updates check out #datathanatology on twitter

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Picks from Floppy Disk Retrospective [A gallery curated by @jolieodell]