All the digital information relies on a physical and material basis which usually remains invisible to the user’s eye, hidden inside every technological device, as well as implemented and necessary to store and manage digital information.

 

Digital and technological waste has then become one of the problems that have increased considerably during the last days, especially during the pandemic Covid-19. The increasing of users and consumers, buying more and more technological devices but also an increase in the number of new users of video callings, virtual meetings and download of apps has led rise de alarms.

The physical and material basis leaves behind a large carbon print and demands a lot of energy. It produces a deep impact in the world, mainly the search for minerals and natural resources for developing technological devices, this is directly related to several Ambiental issues such as river contamination, disturbance on landscapes, loss of animals, among others.

 

And it is a problem that seems to be apparently endless. The more technology, the more data, so this is why it is necessary to gather our efforts to find new and innovative ways to store data and to access them. Current days there is an immense and vast amount of information that needs to be stored, optimized, managed and, protected.

 

This project tackled this issue, by thinking about the infrastructure and the place where this information is deposited.

 

So, one of the questions that guides this project is the following: How could be possible to encrypt information and sensitive data on living matter and animals, such as jaguars, an endangered species?. And how this could promote its conservation, promoting a new consciousness and sensibility towards this animal, and the need of its existence, perceiving again this animal as sacred, as many ancestral people of America did and yet do.

 

To develop this experiment, it is necessary to go back to Jorge Luis Borge’s tale, entitled The God’s script. This wonderful narration talks about a sorcerer who was imprisoned in a small cell, deprived of light, his only companion was a jaguar caged in a cell next to him. This sorcerer wanted to cipher or encrypt in an arrange of words, a kind of magic and powerful spell that would avert all dangers of the world. He came to the conclusion that such script could be only encrypted on the jaguar’s fur, which means on the configuration of the jaguar’s spots.

 

This tale is clearly based on the big significance and meaning that most American native cultures and peoples have upon this animal. The biggest cat Americas is considered fundamental also by biologists, who consider the jaguar as an umbrella species, that means that the presence of this feline ensures the existence of many others, and determines the health of the ecosystems and biodiversity.

 

So we try to face two problems apparently distant but quite interconnected.

We want to find ways to make more sustainable the management of information and storage of digital data, through a shift and change of storage substrate based on jaguars, whose furs show a complex array of stains generating unique patterns and sequences that can be used as substrate/ array or matrix to package and encrypt sensitive data.

 

The principal aim of this project is to generate an alternative to the data storage, not only more efficiently but also cleaner, that can help and solve the contamination problem produced by technological and digital waste, and at the same time it would be a strategy to promote the conservation of this endangered species. Where jaguars became gatekeepers (let’s say sacred animals) with the access key to vital information.

 

Only by ensuring the conservation and the life of this species means the conservation of many other species, in a kind of domino effect. Jaguars maintain and protect natural ecosystems where great biodiversity co-exists and thrives where jaguars live.

An important precedent for developing this project is the QR technology which is a type of matrix barcode. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that contains information about the item to which it is attached.  ("Wikipedia QR code ")

 

One of the planned outcomes is manly a change of mentality, since what we propose is not precisely to protect the data by itself rather protect data by securing the carriers of the information, in this case, jaguars an endangered species. Shifting the focus to the medium itself, just like Marshal Mc Luhan’s main idea: the medium is the message.

 

We will configure a diverse working team, composed of artists, biologists, engineers, semiologists, local knowers: elders, wise men, and women of different communities across America.  Together we plan to develop a completely automatized system to write, store and read information encoded in the jaguar stains. We want to create the very first jaguar stains-reading machine.

 

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