A historical deposit of the oldest written testimony of the Bible, and manuscripts containing some of the works of Virgil were placed into protection in the Arctic World Archive in the Svalbard Islands. All in all, sixty digital copies of as many treasures preserved by the Vatican Apostolic Library have been safely secured for future generations. The digitised manuscripts were transposed onto a special film, using a technology patented by the Piql company from Oslo.
Image: Profile portrait in tempera by Sandro Botticelli, 1495
A historical deposit of the oldest written testimony of the Bible, and manuscripts containing some of the works of Virgil were placed into protection in the Arctic World Archive in the Svalbard Islands. All in all, sixty digital copies of as many treasures preserved by the Vatican Apostolic Library have been safely secured for future generations. The digitised manuscripts were transposed onto a special film, using a technology patented by the Piql company from Oslo. Written onto the film, which boasts a durability guaranteed of at least 500 years, the digital data are saved in simple binary form (0101), in open-source mode, unalterable, yet easily and efficiently recoverable in the future.
Profile portrait in tempera by Sandro Botticelli, 1495
The Arctic World Archive is the result of a collaboration with a Norwegian mining company, found on the Svalbard Islands, also the location of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Inaugurated in 1984, The Global Seed Deposit was created to conserve the seeds of all edible plants existing on planet Earth. The same former coal mine that houses the Global Seed Vault, was decided as the perfect location to create an ultra-secure data warehouse, protecting the digital memory of humanity. Whole digital archives are stored there; digital copies of the most precious historical photos from the Alinari Foundation, a digitised version of the Munch’s The Scream, one of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, documents of Guglielmo Marconi (Italian National Museum of Communication), the egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini (Pisa University Library), Renata Tebaldi, and from European Space Agency missions since 1991, and more and more and more…
No, not even a visionary genius as Dante was, could have imagined that human seeds, virtues and knowledge would share a home and face an eternity of cold, in a nuclear-free underground bunker. But here it is, the hibernating paradise: the vast imagination of archivists and librarians has triumphed.
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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