On Ice: Tokarczuk’s Work Will Outlast Eternity
When we are all long gone, what will be remembered? Almost exactly a year after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s entire body of work will now be saved for eternity at the Arctic World Archive inside an arctic mountain on the Svalbard archipelago.
4,299 pages, which make up the fourteen books penned by Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk, have been transcribed onto an analogue roll, which will soon find its way to the Artic World Archives located deep in an arctic mountain on the Svalbard archipelago. Tokarczuk’s entire body of work will be preserved there for eternity thanks to the efforts of Piql Polska, the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation and Wydawnictwo Literackie.
The news is fantastic… But what does it even mean?
Arctic World Archive
Inaugurated in 2017, the Arctic World Archive (AWA) was created as a collaboration between Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK), a more than 100-year-old mining company located at Svalbard, and Piql AS, an innovative technology company located on mainland Norway.
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Our ambition is to be a secure world archive to help preserve the world's digital memory and ensure that the world's most irreplaceable digital memories of art, culture and literature are secured and made available to future generations.
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Much of our heritage is stored digitally and, despite best efforts to protect it for the future, it can be exposed to risks, either from the online environment or just from the limits of modern storage technology.
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Arctic World Archive
The archive, and the technology it uses, is designed to withstand natural and man-made disasters. Housed in what is considered to be the safest location on earth, the remote, safe and cold conditions found on Svalbard will enable data to live on into the distant future. As for the technology:
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The technology used to store this data is as important as the archive itself. Most digital storage mediums have a limited lifetime, and hardware, software and file formats become obsolete as technology evolves.
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The purpose-built digital medium can last for over 1000 years in the archive with guaranteed future accessibility. The storage medium, piqlFilm, is futureproof and technology independent, so no matter how much time has passed and how technology has evolved, the data will still be accessible.
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Arctic World Archive
Currently, AWA holds an impressive collection of valuable digital artefacts and irreplaceable information from around the world, with over 15 contributing nations. The archive is now home to manuscripts from the Vatican Library, the National Archives of Mexico and Brazil, the National Museum of Norway, the European Space Agency, and masterpieces from different eras (including Rembrandt and Munch), scientific breakthroughs and contemporary cultural treasures. And the archive will continue to grow.
The Nobel Prize-winner on ice
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Olga Tokarczuk, photo: Krzysztof Dubiel / Instytut Książki
We believe that Olga Tokarczuk is currently the only Polish artist to have had her work ‘frozen’ for generations to come – and it is a much deserved distinction.
Tokarczuk is one of the most critically acclaimed and most translated Polish writers. An outstanding writer, essayist and a devotee of Jung, she is considered an authority on philosophy and arcane knowledge. Undeniably a great discovery for Polish literature in the 1990s, she continues to be a phenomenon hugely admired by critics and readers alike. In 2019, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature (2018).
Tokarczuk has won numerous awards for her work, including the prestigious Polish awards the Polityka Passport and the Nike Literary Award, as well as the Vilenica International Literary Prize. Her book Drive Your Plough Through the Bones of the Dead was the basis of Agnieszka Holland's award-winning movie Spoor. Notably, she is the first Polish writer to win the Man Booker International Prize – for her novel Flights translated by Jennifer Croft.
Here’s to more Polish culture saved for generations to come!
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