THE SKOR CODEX - LA SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME

In times of crisis and cultural funding cuts La Société Anonyme is an international artist collective formally committed to find alternative ways to sustain art.
Their first project is The SKOR Codex, a printed book whose content (text, pictures and sounds) is binary encoded, with enclosed visual instructions about how to decode it. It’s meant to be preserved for the future in a classic « time capsule » strategy. The human attitude to make such capsules (usually buried for posterity), is here embodied in the standards of a universal object (the book) and a copy has been commissioned to be indefinitely preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France through a signed agreement.
There are a few values which emerges from this gesture: the attribution to the printed page of the « digital preservation medium » status; the definition of the book as a potential self-contained « time capsule »; and the recognition of the library as an irreplaceable repository for the future. And with the SKOR codex placed in the daedalus of the BnF shelves one would wonder, how many other potential « time capsules » are just buried in the biggest libraries around the world?

La Société Anonyme is an artist’s collective born from the ashes of the Dutch 2013 funding cuts to the arts. An avant-garde art collective with a corporate twist après la lettre, La Société Anonyme launches its first product in July 2012: The SKOR Codex, a book preserving the legacy of one of the Netherlands’ perishing art organisations for the distant future. Adopting an experimental model of artistic corporation, La Société Anonyme responds to the commodification of culture by searching for alternative ways to make, promote and sustain art. La Société Anonyme is represented by Dušan Barok, Danny van der Kleij, Aymeric Mansoux, and Marloes de Valk.
http://societeanonyme.la/