“Sooner or later,” Martin said when
we first met in Gmunden, “we’ll have
to delete data, massively. Just for
economical and ecological reasons.
This deletion will not be organised,
not considered in selecting what we
want to keep.”
The idea of creating a time capsule
started for Martin as a stand against
our own impermanence, and as
a rebuttal to the Big Deletion. He
would gather and protect the data,
documents and ephemera of the
present moment.
“As a species, we’re collectors and
rememberers. We leave traces of
ourselves everywhere,” he told me.
“So I thought, What if we leave some-
thing more permanent? How would
we do it?”
So began the Memory of Man-
kind (MOM) project in his shop in
- With his first ceramic tablet,
he etched a greeting, explaining
that here lies “a preservation pro-
ject” meant to protect knowledge
about “our present civilisation from
oblivion and collective amnesia.” It
is dated by astronomical events, as
it’s unclear whether those who come
many millennia in the future will
know how to read numbers. There’s
also a pictionary, so they can under-
stand our letters and words.
He’s up to over 600 tablets, with
citizens, scholars, experts and
enthusiasts sending material they
want printed on a tablet through his
website. They send their diary entries
and love letters, newspaper articles
and obscure dissertations, blogs and
texts, the most important parts of us.
“MOM is the first ‘bottom-up’ history
of the world,” said Martin.
Etched ceramic tablets, like the one on the right, are stored inside crates in the salt mine63
The Archivist of Everything