OUR MISSION
Living Records is a speculative project addressing gaps in history stored through technology, memory, or legacy. Through our research in the lab, we contend with what is remembered, and what is forgotten. What echoes throughout history, such as the words of a President inspiring us to go to the moon, and what slips away, like the efforts of the underrepresented people who made that journey possible.
We propose a series of biologically fabricated records that highlight the impermanence of data technology and center histories that are forgotten or actively erased: a bacterial cellulose cassette tape, a biofabricated core rope memory circuit, and an oral history preserved through its audience. Living Records help us understand the unspoken labour that promotes human progress as well as the efforts that we, as fellow organisms on earth, must take to resist being forgotten.
As our technology decays, our values and stories don’t have to. Living Records acknowledges how human progress is directed by our stories and those who write them. Bringing forth the question: What will you do to hold these records?
Our Team
Bibliography/Dedications
02 BIOFABRICATED CORE ROPE MEMORY CIRCUIT
Introduction
Core Rope Memory Circuits were the technology that sent us to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission. This technology is a read-only memory (ROM) used in early computers composed of woven wires and magnetic core rings to create a binary of 1s and 0s. This binary is read via a sensor wire woven through the matrix of cores. Sending enough current through ‘flips’ the polarities inducing a pulse of voltage that can be recorded. The writing of each core can be done by selectively sending currents through wire, and each core represents one bit of data. The core rope memory is the precursor of modern memory storage systems that hold trillions of bits in your pockets.
HistoryAmidst the fame of landing the first man on the moon, much of the contributions and labor that was necessary to make this mission possible has been underrepresented. We want to honor and value these contributions that we discovered through our research:
Hilda G. Carpenter:
The first core rope memory circuit was created at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and woven by Hilda G. Carpenter, an African-American laboratory assistant and technician responsible for assembling the intricate frames. Her name and face, however, was rarely ever featured in publications of this breakthrough.
Navajo Women:
About 1,000 unnamed Navajo women were employed by Fairchild Semiconductor, NASA’s producer of circuits, who opened a factory on a Navajo reservation in plans to outsource low-cost, highly-skilled labour.
“LOL”:
Core rope memory circuits were nicknamed “LOL memory” for the Little Old Ladies in the factories who would weave them together.
Margaret Hamilton:
Margaret Hamilton led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo command and lunar modules. While this photo of Hamilton and a visualization of her cognitive labour has shared her contributions virally, most stories of the women who contributed to this technology have not.
We propose creating a tangible form of data storage with biological material, where you can count the number of bits in your hand and understand the finite lifespan each core has. This bio circuit serves not as a replacement for long term storage, but as an object that highlights the ephemeral nature of memory and data archives, in contrast to our impressions of today’s so-called “permanent” storage.
Our goal was to grow magnetized bacterial cellulose, stabilized with biomineralization, and utilize the adaptive and conductive ability of slime mold. If successful, we can encode erased data on material created by organisms, reproducing
a core memory circuit out of biological materials.
Our focus was divided into two components from the core rope memory circuit: the magnetic cores and the sensor wire.
The Cores:
The cores are magnetic rings that flip their polarities to encode a 0 or 1 polarity. We made our cores in collaboration with K. hansenii, E. coli, and S. pasteurii.
K. hansenii:
When placed in liquid media, this bacteria produces a buoyant structure that it uses as a raft to float on top of its liquid media. This provides us a malleable material that's easy to treat and manipulate.
E. coli:
To give our pellicles magnetic attributes, we referenced Dr. Sundaravadanam Vishnu Vadanan’s research in co-culturing K. hansenii with an E. coli that has a peptide derived from a magnetotactic bacteria, as well as a specific curli protein, which bonds to the cellulose and creates nucleation sites for the synthesis of Fe3O4 nanoparticles in the cellulose scaffold.
To visualize the success of a co-culturing, we used E. coli that is genetically modified with a red fluorescent protein (RFP). This RFP E. coli was a stand-in for Dr. Vadanan’s magnetotactic E. coli.
The purpose of this co-culturing is to allow us to ‘code’ our cores with magnetic currents. This attribute is what is capable of holding information.
S. pasteurii:
Our final step is to provide structure to our cores with S. pasteurii.This bacteria is capable of biomineralization. The culture is capable of producing calcium carbonate when exposed to a mineralization media (which contains calcium chloride and urea). Bacterial cellulose is made of 98% water, shrinking down to a thin and fragile state. The crystalline structure that this bacteria produces provides the needed stability for handling and threading of these cores.
The Sensor Wire:
The sensor wire is the ‘reading’ wire that is woven through the matrix of cores. The sensor wires run a current through itself to identify any flips in the polarities in the cores. To read our cores, we call upon the wiring capabilities of our physarum polycephalum friends.
Physarum Polycephalum:
Following Dr. Adam Adamatzky’s paper, “Physarum wires: Self-growing self-repairing smart wires made from slime mould,” we were able to route a circuit with slime mold, proving the conductivity of its plasmodial tubes. Recognizing its smart path-drawing properties between chemoattractants, we placed valerian root powder in the magnetic cores which it traveled through. The slime mold in our circuit would be the sensor wire— connecting the information of each bit.
Our biological circuit will degrade, creating a tangible representation of the transience of memory and the effort it takes to maintain knowledge throughout history. What would you encode on the circuit? What must we no longer forget?