In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World
#pabc2015 @JonIppolito
Inspirations
Inspirations
"If you take the Christian bible and put it out in the wind and rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will be gone. Our bible is the wind and rain."
--Salish elder
"In wildness is the preservation of the world."
--Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)
Mapinguary
Oldest human record?
Linear A 3,500 years
Mapinguary 10,000+ years
Part 1: Preservation in the Wild
Preservation in the wild
Wild preservationists
Context
Wild culture
Domesticated culture
Emulators carry context with them
The Erl King
Grahame Weinbren and Roberta Friedman, The Erl King (1982, emulated 2004)
Library of Congress: "Emulation may serve our needs better than hardware"
Emulation by professionals: 2004-present
Emulation by amateurs: 1974-present
Who's making emulators now?
Emulators by amateurs
Diverging, re-converging, and constantly improving.
No one in charge.
Where are feral preservationists?
Wild programmers
"We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft"
Wild artists
ReCode Project
Part 2: Preservation by the Wild
Suzanne Briet, "What Is Documentation?"
Crowdsourcing on a genetic scale
Pilar Bosch, Valencia
Advances in organic computing
Scientists have
________________Storage________________
- Stored Shakespeare and JPEGs in DNA
- Stored data in live neurons
________________Computing________________
- Engineered e. coli to solve logic problems
- Mixed DNA that reads digital images
- Created cellular wifi with viruses
________________Networking________________
- Designed a CellOS operating system
Claims for the organic archive
Dense
1 gram of DNA
= 700 TB of data
= 14,000 50-GB Blu-ray discs
Stable
DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.
How does DNA storage work?
1) Encode
2) Replicate
Replication
Polymerase Chain Reaction "lets you pick the piece of DNA you're interested in and have as much of it as you want"
--Kary Mullis, inventor of PCR
DNA is built by evolution for evolution
Problems
Evolution creates genetic drift/draft.
Ultraviolet rays create mutations.
PCR generates errors.
Solutions?
Encapsulate in tiny glass spheres
Hide it in the Svalbard Seed Vault
Fix it with "organic checksums" (Reed-Solomon codes)
No: storage is not preservation
Failures of domesticating wildness
Lesson: Respect the ecosystem
Antibiotic-resistant germs
Suicide seeds
Pharming
Outcompeting native species
Cultivating the ecosystem
Kolymbetra gardens
LA Natural History Museum
Part 3: Working with the Wild
Working with feral programmers
Working with feral visitors
"Scanathon" at San Francisco Museum of Asian Art
Working with feral artists (1)
Grazia Varisco and Reprogrammed Art
Working with feral artists (2)
@jonippolito • Re-collection.com • DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu
jonippolito.net/presentations
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