We live in a world in constant change. A constant development that creates new opportunities. Positive for some and negative for others. The traces preserved from the past give us a picture of how the world once was. This applies in the natural sciences as well as in the fields of culture. Decisive for what will be preserved for the future is the “carrier” of the information, i.e. the medium that stores the information including the tools that make the information available to us.
This week’s photos are from the beach in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria where artists every year create fantastic sculptures in the sand with traditional biblical Christmas motifs. The motifs are well known from countless other surviving illustrations. In this case, it is sand that is the “information carrier”. The shape of the grains of sand and the humidity of the sand allows the sand to be shaped into these impressive sculptures. However, weather and wind will turn everything into the original sandy beach, meaning that the information the sculptures conveyed is lost forever. Fortunately, they are well documented through reams of photographs. They are “immortalized” as it was so nicely called in the childhood of photography.
But nothing lasts forever. Using optics to let light create images was known for hundreds of years, but it was only when chemically preserving these “images” on metal, glass and paper was achieved that photography made its breakthrough. Many photographs have faded away over the years, but there are several examples of amazing photographs that have been preserved for posterity. Nowadays, the image information is stored digitally on all kinds of magnetic and electrical media; images made available on screens and in print on various media. What will be preserved for the future depends on whether we can decode (interpret and understand) the digital information so that we can present it on new media. It is certainly possible to recreate the sculptures in sand using a suitable 3D printer, so maybe they are “immortalized”…
