Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

The Playboy Cover
to Cover Hard Drive
which collects all
650 issues of Playboy
Magazine, 100,000
pages, on a single
custom-designed
hard disk, 2010
magazine pages, as well as searchable OCR-generated text, both of
which can be accessed through formats such as PDF as well as online
viewing. But the question remains: does any of this really qualify as
‘archiving’? In purely technical terms it probably does. On the other
hand, we must also take into account the intrinsically unsteady nature
of digital data: there is still no long-term (or even medium-term) preservation
technology for digital data that guarantees data integrity for
even as little as 50 years in ideal conditions. And conditions are often
far from ideal; data can easily become corrupted for any of a number of
reasons. The media itself might be damaged (de-magnetised, de-layered,
scratched, broken, etc) or exposed to environmental factors (sun,
heat, electromagnetic interference, humidity, bacteria, smoke, etc); or
the hardware or software required to read, decode, or decompress the
data may no longer be available for whatever reason. Likewise, the data
may become inaccessible (though not actually lost) if some essential
network node is ‘down’, or if any of the network’s various technologies
is malfunctioning and no longer being maintained.
Meanwhile, the durable printed copies can still be found in libraries
worldwide, where nothing short of some catastrophic physical accident
can ‘delete’ them. The oldest surviving printed copy of a book
(the Diamond Sutra) was block-printed more than 1,100 years ago,
in 868 CE; the earliest known preserved writings, on clay tablets, are
several thousand years old. One rare case of a new medium developed
specifically for extremely long-term data storage is the Rosetta Disk:
“Inspired by the historic Rosetta Stone, the Rosetta Disk is intended
to be ‘a durable archive of human languages’ (…) Made of
nickel alloy (with a 2,000 year life expectancy), the physical Disk is
three inches across, and micro-etched with over 13,000 pages of
language documentation, covering over 1,500 languages.” 273
On the other hand, the collective memory of contemporary society
is extremely vulnerable, preserved on magnetic hard disks with
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