Perugia, 13 April 2005
Gianfranco Cialini is a retired 60 year-old man who lives in a village of 1000 souls, called “Sant’Arcangelo sul Trasimeno”, in Perugia, Italy.
Actually there are 999 souls, as one of them, me, has recently moved to U.K.
One day, while he was tidying up the Library in the University of Perugia, he discovered something amazing, something that no one else has spotted before, something that you need a good eye and great intuition to discern from all the other thousands of books: 50 Hebrew Manuscripts.
That day, April 13th 2005, Gianfranco Cialini “simply” found some dialogues between the Vatican and Israel, six double folios from a beautiful Hebrew Bible and some copies of a book destroyed by the Church during the Inquisition.
When the print came out, the value of the manuscripts collapsed the book market and typographers started to buy manuscripts at kilos and reuse them to create book covers. So on that day, the belief that such historic thoughts were lost, was revisited.
Gianfranco has made a lot of discoveries in his career but whats more, a few years earlier he found the first Italian musical score dating back to the year 1300 and Italian history of music was rewritten. In particular, the birth of the musical style Ars Nova Italiana was pushed back several years. Quite a lucky guy!
London, 13 April 3013
Gianfranco Xialiny XBF is 60 years old and he can also be 43 years in his Facebook timeline.
He is retired but through the Xmironex process he looks like his 20 year-old nephew for few hours a day. It allows him to work and continue his pursuing passions all his life.
He lives in a small building of 1000 residents, called London in the city of Liverpool.
One sunny, snowy and also rainy day with temperatures between 43 and 48 degrees, Gianfranc Xialiny XBF while tiding up the invisible screen at the British Library, found a unusual microchip, hidden between hundreds of other microchips.
That day, April 13th 3113, something amazing was discovered, something that has never seen before, something that you need a good UVA eye to spot. Gianfranc Xialiny XBF spotted the first form of Arcade Game applied in Finance, forgotten and lost between thousand and thousands of data. At the beginning was difficult to read, part of the binary code went lost but through persevering researches he got it!
That day his life changed: He has since been recognised by the Digital Preservation Society (born by the merger of Microsoft with Google), and discovery contributed to the rewriting of the story of gamification.
Digital preservation pioneers such as Jerry McDonough or David Kirsh, who lived in the region of USA 1000 years ago and spent their life in the preservation of digital worlds, would have been proud of him.
Since the beginning of the Internet, researchers, scientists and their avatars have been interested in the conservation and preservation of digital data such as audio or movie content, keen to conserve our stories, preserve our traces.
Well, it is true that if some data of some silly politicians was lost it might not be the end of the day.
London, 18 April 3012
It’s 12.54, and I am writing on the Lean Mean fighting machine blog.
I had a weird dream last tonight that the city of London was squeezed in a building and bankers where playing Donkey Kong in the basement to lift a country out of crisis. But no one had any memory of it.
Since then I am plagued by a continuous thought:
What will the children of my children’s children’s children find at the Brick Lane Vintage market about me in 3012? Would they buy my vintage Facebook profile picture of?
What about the guy in Memento? Will he be continuously rearranging his social media profile on his digital skin according to the information he scans while surfing the net in 3012?
Tough questions. Hard to give you an answer and I am not the right person. The only thing I know is that I will think twice before I bring my G4 iPhone to the charity shop when I’ll be 99 years old.
Pts. … Google… I am pleased with this article. Can you make me a backup on a stone please?
"Make sure you save that picture so Annie will see it when she’ll grow up”! Can we consider it a form of preservation?
(The parchment found by G. Cialini)
