HDSP is important!

by Wolf-Günter Thiel, art historian and publisher, Berlin


Hornsleth Deep Storage Project is in different ways dealing with one of the most important issues of civilization. The phrase represents main questions of civilization: How is it possible to keep information available and accessible for the future?

Looking back 15 years, we are mostly not able to read the information which was stored by the elder computer generations. So a lot of the digital information is already lost just 15 years later.

The question remains: How do companies, states or other institutional archives keep their information, if they do not with the traditional means of paper and print? To put it into an individual perspective: how does the individual keep individual, if not to say subjective information for future generations?

Part of the answer is the projection of this onto ones children, part of it is projected on architecture, and part of it is projected on art collections and sustainable cultural commissions and the production of artworks themselves.

Hornsleth Deep Storage Project draws attention to a third aspect which somehow combines the two already mentioned: How do original cultures keep their cultural identities as the Chamorro people on Guam Island?

How can they express their desire to keep roots of their culture for the future in a lively and active way for future generations? This question shows the desire not to lose a culture which has been cultivated a kept for generations and generations.

Artworks are throughout history important archives of the cultural time in which they were produced.

If we like to know something about the time on a broader scale we look at the images or listen to the music or visit the architecture or theatre of a time. In history the strongest world powers would try to instrumentalize the arts to conserve their own existence for future societies and cultures.		   These potentates would order artists to find ways to do this for them. Since the idea of modern art the artist deliberately produced art and produced art which would feed his own ideas and needs as well as show aspects of humanism and enlightment. Kristian von Hornsleth stands in this tradition.

He alludes to the dream of people to become part of an artwork, the history of art and the history of civilization today and the future. They can be part of it just with the decision to be part of it and the sample of their own DNA.

Kristian von Hornsleth suggests a monumental sculpture at the deepest ground of the seas and puts a DNA archive into it to store the DNA of 5000 people for the future. 5000 people who deliberately believe in the idea of the artwork today and believe in a future option of being rediscovered.

The project is transcultural, transnational, and sustainable for around 20.000 years at least.

The project is generated with high end scientific backups in oceanography and philosophy. The chamoran people from Guam take this project to express the problem of vanishing original cultures and cultural tribes in general.

The project is not only relevant for people from one country or culture circle, but for people from around the globe. It shows that the question of where we come from and where we go to is transcultural and transnational and relevant through the time of existence of the human species.

Different cultures have different answers, but share the same desire to be relevant in the future and to the future. An artistic project which can draw this attention to the different cultures and habits and still be open, sustainable and peaceful is one of its kinds. It needs and deserves every support possible.