Future Archive and the Biomolecular Humanities

Join Creative Manchester for an informal networking lunch to discuss the future of data storage.

Molecular storage solutions for our incipient data crisis are being developed in haphazard ways. Millions of bytes of information are currently being produced and storage is expensive, expanding, and highly energy intensive. Synthesizing DNA and using it to store information both inert and in vivo has been proposed to address ongoing challenges about capacity and sustainability. Research in the past 10 years has led to a revolution in capability of this technology. Our future information may be stored in DNA, putting molecular matter at the heart of the humanities.

Future DNA storage and future DNA encryption possibilities suggest a biomolecular architecture for communications, cybersecurity, data manipulation, and memory. Yet this incredibly modern-seeming process brings us back to a familiar archival story about power, ownership, organisation, nationhood, and information security. Whilst such new interactions may allow for more sustainable futures at the same time there is need to ensure that ethics, bias, justice, equality and access are at the centre of developing intellectual and practical frameworks.

Biomolecular practices, archives, technologies and datasets have the capacity and the potential to obviate standard models of knowledge, practices of communication, and construction of archives. Enhanced genetic and biomolecular understanding suggests the possibility of a new type of humanities, one that understands the human entirely differently. The biomolecularisation of the archive suggests a shift to an embodied, molecular, biological understanding of the archive as something alive and also of-life, shifting our apprehension of what a knowledge production system is.

This event – presented by Creative Manchester and the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology – will bring together those working in biotechnology, ethics, archives and museums to discuss the future of data storage. In particular there will be an opportunity to hear about ongoing and current projects that are looking to use synthetic DNA to store information.

Speakers

Jerome De Groot, Professor of Literature and Culture at The University of Manchester Patrick Cai, Chair Professor of Synthetic Genomics, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, The University of Manchester Kewin Gombeau, Research Fellow at The University of Manchester Raymond Wan, Research Associate at The University of Manchester