nothing goes without saying

{image: Anri Sala}

If you have any interest in architecture and its multiple-multiple intersections into all aspects of culture, and if you've never stopped by BLDGBLOG, be ye referred. Geoff Manaugh is one of my favorite types of thinkers/idea-collectors. Here's an example from a recent post Called "Planet Harddrive." :

For several years I've been fascinated by what might be called the geological nature of harddrives – how certain mineral arrangements of metal and ferromagnetism result in our technological ability to store memories, save information, and leave previous versions of the present behind. A harddrive, though, would be a geological object as much as a technical one; it is a content-rich, heavily processed re-configuration of the earth's surface. This reminds me of another ongoing fantasy of mine, which is that perhaps someday we won't actually need harddrives at all: we'll simply use geology itself. In other words, what if we could manipulate the earth's own magnetic field and thus program data into the natural energy curtains of the planet? The earth would become a kind of spherical harddrive, with information stored in those moving webs of magnetic energy that both surround and penetrate its surface.