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
03 LEGEND AS LEGACY
In our research of the Apollo 11 core rope memory that took humanity to the moon, we were shaken by the recent erasure of information around Artemis, the mission that would mark our return to the rock we see every night.
Here is a screenshot taken from NASA’s official website statement of the Artemis mission on March 14th of this year...
...just a day before it was changed to what’s below, the statement everyone can view today online.
We speculate writing this Biocore as a record unreadable by AI, a technology currently used for erasure. We want to embody the transience of memory and data storage as well as the necessity for storytelling as a means of preservation.
Everyone who witnesses Living Records is also an active record, engaging with this project that asks us how we choose to hold the irreplaceable contributions of those often unwritten in our histories. We do not have to travel to the moon to mark progress when we can commit more curiosity and care for the human and more-than-human universes already on our planet.
The best record of the past and present is not just our technology but the thoughtful action which carries the lessons of our ambitions, shortcomings, and possibilities into our future.
Like how we choose to go to the moon, we choose to record lost legacies. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we know must survive for the giant leaps of all humankind and beyond.