Biohybrid Archives

From the Andean khipu to SSD drives and DNA, data storage infrastructures resource life for memory . This chapter harnesses ethnographic case studies in data centers and experimental laboratories to render the history and future of life as both the infrastructure and locus of memory . Practices of cultivation necessary to sustain computer servers are contrasted with those of living plants whose genetics have been altered to store information in the Grow-Your-Own-Cloud project. Computation is framed in metabolic terms, poised against an imagined postcapitalist order of data gardens, where memory is available perennially rather than constantly. The living archive of the plant is figured as a biohybrid object and a blueprint for an alternative memory ecology.