Summary - digitalmediabremen/arche_scriptures-documentation GitHub Wiki

information

• Title: Arche-scripture: a speculative archeological experiment
• Category: Semesterarbeit
• Students: Alberto Harres
• Course Title: Master Project 2021-22
• Lecturers: Prof. Ralf Baecker, Prof. Dennis P Paul
• Year: WS 2021/22
• Awards: Hochschulpreis 2022 Digital Media

ARCHE-SCRIPTURES

ARCHE-SCRIPTURES revolves around understanding ceramics as a possible medium to store digital information. It "emerges from an impossibility, from the ambivalence between two disparate realms: archaism and future" - it proposes an archaic digital medium, a paradox of fragility and permanence, which seeks to "resignify the assumed linearity between past and future, deconstruct the idea of vertical time, history and technology"(BORGES, Fabi).

During the Hochschultage 2022, ARCHE-SCRIPTURES presents itself as a speculative archeological dig-site. At the courtyard of HfK Speicher XI building, a ceramic artifact is being scanned by an decrypting machine, through which the visitor is invited to listen as the original audio data engraved onto the ceramics is slowly retrieved and sonified. The experience offers a glimpse on a possible future past, it speculates on the future of our digital traces through an ancestro-futuristic perspective, provoking a discussion about continuity, preservation and archiving.

The data stored in the ceramic pieces consists of voice recordings extracted from the Pandemic Archive of Voices. In the headphones one can listen to the software attempting to read back the engraved information. The surviving piece being decrypted by the machine has engraved the sound of the word “dalijna”, meaning “distance”.

References:

1. Archivist Manifesto, Yuk Hui
2. Between Matter and Hand: On Gaston Bachelard’s Theory of Material Imagination, Yanping Gao
3. ANCESTROFUTURISM Ancestralities and Technoshamanism - Fabiane M Borges

Open Source:

• Documentation Wiki
• Processing/Arduino Code for the Hochscultage software version mneunomne/archeReaderController
• Python/OpenCV Code for the software used in Master Project Exhibition mneunomne/fiducial_marker
• Browser display software for the Master Project Exhibition mneunomne/archeology
• Fork from the YOLOv5 library to work on the abandoned OCR part of the project mneunomne/YOLOv5
• Pandemic Archive of Voices
• Python Audio Conversion Process

Credits:

• Documentation Photos & Setup: kazu^2
• Sound Design: Chi Him Chik
• Assistance in ceramic production: Prof. Ute Fischer
• Assistance in eletronics: Felix Fisgus