What is Genomic Media?

Since the 1990s, corporations and governments have made huge investments in DNA and DNA-related technologies. Genomics is widely regarded as cutting-edge, with implications for health and forensics, as well as for the sort of take-home genetic testing that has been popularized over the past 20 years.

During this same period, data storage has become more and more challenging–data centres in their current form require enormous amounts of energy, and have a lifespan that caps out at around 100 years. Moreover, the amount of data produced in the world is rising at an unprecedented rate–humans are projected to generate 33 zettabytes of data by 2025 (for context a zettabyte is 10²¹ bytes of data, or roughly equivalent to the storage of fifteen billion, six hundred twenty-five million 64GB smartphones) and these numbers increase every year, creating an ever-worsening data storage problem.

Now, our obsession with genomics and our insatiable hunger for data and data storage solutions have begun to collide, with DNA being touted as one possible solution to our ever-increasing demand for data storage. We are now able to store data using nucleotide chains made up of the nucleobases–adenine, tyrosine, cytosine and guanine (ATCG)--coding binary data in DNA form, to be decoded as necessary. 

Data stored in the form of DNA has the potential to last far longer than data stored in current conventional data centers–thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands of years, compared to less than a century with our current storage methods. Massive investments in genomic technologies, advancements in our ability to map the human genome, the exponential growth of data alongside genomics, and the popular understanding of DNA as the most fundamental building blocks of life are all part of what has made this possible. 

The human genome, data storage, and media more broadly are becoming more and more inextricable from one another, with wide ranging implications. As you explore this website, we will guide you through some of the historical, political, infrastructural and social questions that the new reality of genomic media raises.