La Société Anonyme
SKOR Codex

SKOR Codex is a printed book that contains binary encoded image and sound files from the website of the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), a public art organisation whose funding was cut by the Dutch government in 2013. The files in SKOR Codex are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure by recording information through ink on paper. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded. La Société Anonyme note that ‘the book will be decoded only if there will be advanced civilizations on earth in the far future. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about art on this planet.’

Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule and a statement rather than an attempt to preserve SKOR for future art historians. This work speaks to the challenges of archiving in the digital age where twenty-one complete copies of the Gutenburg Bible are still in existence but no examples of the first websites produced exist. Eight copies of SKOR Codex were produced, and have been collected by internationally significant archives. At the conclusion of Experimenta Recharge, this copy of SKOR Codex will be donated to the State Library of Victoria.

La Société Anonyme is represented by Dušan Barok, Danny van der Kleij, Aymeric Mansoux, and Marloes de Valk. The SKOR Codex won a ‘New Face Award’ at the Japanese Media Arts Festival 2014, and is currently archived at the Royal Library, The Hague (NL), The Rietveld Academy Archive, Amsterdam (NL), Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (FR), The Open Data Institute, London (UK), The National Art Center, Tokyo (JP) and the State Library of Victoria (AU) (2016, at the conclusion of the Experimenta Recharge national tour).

Presented as part of: Experimenta Recharge: 6th International Biennial of Media Art, which toured Australia in 2014–2016.