Palimpsest

Palimpseste is a project about knowledge and heritage. It aims to discuss the challenges of ensuring the sustainability of our data and the infrastuctures needed for it to last.

The natural foundations of our memory are slowly collapsing. Remembering as a basic human activity is turning into an underrated exercise. This is because more and more information is externalized on portable devices, hard drives and online cloud services. Mankind’s burgeoning desire is to rescue every bit of information from obscurity and safeguard scientific and cultural knowledge. Yet, to do so means that we are becoming increasingly dependent on technology and digital media.

The acceleration of technology introduces some serious risks. It dangers the preservation of entire bodies of knowledge. This is due to the decreasing life-span of digital formats and platforms used to storing mankind’s memory. Large scientific institutions like NASA have had to encounter the challenges of digital revolution with diligence. Their efforts have been progressively focused on recovering data from complete obliteration from old file formats. This said, digital dark age is a factual threat if sustainable methods for safekeeping data are not addressed with urgency.

Philippe Braquenier's Palimpsest is a documentary project that crops up from this hastily developing technological landscape. It bears witness to the contemporary infrastructures of information repositories. In architecture, the word palimpsest is used to refer to the accumulation of design elements in a particular place over time. Braquenier’s photographs incorporate architectural, technological and natural components with impressive clarity. The libraries, data centres and both natural and built environments Braquenier approaches, hold a strong reference to the legacies of human knowledge.

The proximity of natural and technological milieus seems to propose a dependency in which one cannot exist without the other. Braquenier’s interest in the information depots expands from the question of their relationship to landscape and urban infrastructures, to what is required to sustain the archives of human history. The aesthetic quality of Braquenier’s work is exquisite and well-measured. It points us to consider our forever sprouting interactions with technology.