The Data Capsule

the four violet glass bowls inside the capsule contain data and artifacts, biofacts (genetic material) and a selection of cultivated and wild seeds.

Above: left to right, cultivated seeds and wild seeds.

About the data, a statement from Ryan Seibold, 2016:
My involvement with the Ark began when I proposed to Sean that he store seed inside his work as an act of preservation for the future. We met later on this idea and it was decided that I would be the curator of the data. Later at home I looked up the word data and found that information and knowledge are derived from data. Data is symbol. When we are lost, we use data to find our way home. And when we have questions, we look to the data. Using data, we can discern where we should grow the best coffee using latitude and elevation. My research began with a question first about what species, especially food crops, would be most adaptable to our lands, knowing the impossibility of knowing how our future landscapes will manifest. What food plant species have stood the test of time? My query tied together a few strands of my evolving knowledge of plants: a great concern for our future ecology and species loss, and ethnobotany. This thread of an idea led me to the Hiller seed collection held at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Wesley Hiller was a dentist in Minneapolis who was also an avid anthropologist. He persistently collected seed focusing on ancient and indigenous plants. The collection includes species such as corn, beans, squash, rice, pumpkin, watermelon, tomatoes, cotton, tobacco and sunflowers, mainly from the Upper Midwest, Plains, and Southwestern regions of the United States. I went to see the seed and learned more regarding the history of the collection. A conversation with Scott Shoemaker, the ethnobotanist at the museum, directed me more fully to a specific collection that originated in North Dakota around the Upper Missouri River. Following a letter to his brother, a man named Oscar Will set out to North Dakota to help his brother’s friend, and military comrade, out with a nursery business. An act had just been established to allow farmers an additional 160 acres of land if trees were planted. After a few years Oscar succeeded in taking over the business and soon had an interest in supplying seed to local farmers and gardeners. Farmers at the time were struggling with the climate and environmental conditions, and Will looked to the Native Americans farming in the area from the Fort Berthold Reservation: the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. Growth of Will’s seed company began to take off when he acquired corn. Will admired the Native American agriculturist deeply. In one of the catalogues he is quoted: “Few people realize that North Dakota has been an agricultural state for at least two hundred years. For at least that long Mandan Indians have grown these varieties of hardy vegetables, carefully selecting their seed for both earliness and drought resistance, and exercising great care to keep their several varieties of corn separate.” (from Snapshot of Agricultural History, Lisa Burke). This research and a further direction to read a book called Enduring Seeds, written by Gary Paul Nabhan, connected me to the wild frontier of seeds and their conservation. In this context I began to understand our food’s long history of selective breeding… and sadly, to where we are today. Previous agriculturists understood the value of wildness. For instance, many indigenous farmers planted teosinte, corn’s ancestor, near or along the borders of their cornfields. Adding wild strains into the mix likely added to the genetic diversity of the whole system. In my mind this is akin to passing down stories through generations. In either case information is transmitted.

The Data.

Our data includes the wild so that we may tell the story from the remotest angle within the ark. There are four glass bowls inside the orb containing cultivated seed, wild seed, artifacts, and biofacts. Nine specimens in each bowl represent nine planets of our solar system, including Pluto. The glass bowls are made by Miron Violett Glas; the glass allows only violet light and certain other types of spectral light (UV-A and infrared light) to enter, blocking the more damaging elements of light. These bowls will be sealed hermetically inside an orb/light fixture with a glass lens allowing light to enter and sight into the vault.

Many of our objects today have a “wild,” or indigenous, analog. It’s not a difference of the material thing; it’s more a difference of the spirit of the thing. Reciprocity with the land is nearly absent today. We use technologies today in which the raw materials necessary for producing goods come from far flung landscapes and places. Most of so-called modern society has no connection to the land or people where these resources originate. At one time human civilizations gave a little of themselves to the spirits in order to use some of what the earth provided. We have sacrificed our spirit as a result by not being dimensionally aware.

The data that we have collected is in no way conclusive to the Anthropocene, it is fragmentary, a spatial-temporal grab, or improvisation. Some data goes back two hundred years, or perhaps a thousand years, while other data is more recent or mysterious (writing rock), hypothetical, or simulated (“asteroid glass”). The data is also personal, reflecting our individual conscious attempts to tell a story about our interests and experiences on earth.

Transmissions.

The work of Sean Connaughty is a transmission from an unknown future, communicating an enduring ray of hope that drives us to understand the universal and powers our senses to survive and endure. The flood is happening now in our daily lives in the form of data. Long ago humans had a spatial-temporal experience of data, as though they were living inside technology and respecting its full magnitude. We no longer comprehend the transmissions because technology has evolved beyond our grasping. Some of this technology is grafted onto the ark. This is perhaps the new mode, a techno-primitive adaptation, as we cannot assume fixed environmental situations any longer. Grafting technologies onto simulations of nature.

The Ark.

Our current “livable” earth is the result of 4.5 billion years of evolution. The span on which we live is a sliver in time within this spectrum of time. To be a habitable place many variables are held sway by temporal patterns and cycles, planetary, ecological, geologic, oceanic, tectonic, etc. The Ark takes on some of these patterns internally and plugs into a larger environment. The internal and the external will affect its survivability. If we look at our own places and spaces we realize our living conditions have this same relationship, and often we feel separate from the larger earth processes happening, though they are impacting us each second we live. There is no way to “feel” how the earth orbits around the sun, but we can feel the wind on our cheeks. Somewhere in between, some of us witness the “bigger” events. The wind we felt one morning whisked along several hundred miles and became part of a larger system. The Ark pulls this feeling into itself. As it floats, it bobs and sways with the inertia of the waves, almost looking planet-like. But white, like a frozen over earth nearly three-quarters of a billion years ago. Only a hint of possibility can be viewed inside, through a glass lens, a biosphere.”
by Ryan Seibold, 2016