The SKOR Codex is a printed book which will be sent to different locations on earth in the year 2012. It contains binary encoded image and sound files selected to portray the diversity of life and culture at the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), and is intended for any intelligent terrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find it. The files are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure via a transformation from magnetic transitions on a disk to ink on paper, safe for centuries. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded. La Société Anonyme noted that “the package will be encountered and the book decoded only if there will be advanced civilizations on earth in the far future. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about art on this planet.” Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule and a statement rather than an attempt to preserve SKOR for future art historians. The SKOR Codex is a project by La Société Anonyme.

Curator Annet Dekker interviewed La Société Anonyme about the Codex as part of the commission NetArtWorks #Online Archives in 2012 by SKOR and it was also published in Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, April 2014.

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.

The SKOR Codex PDF
The SKOR Codex video
An explanation of how we translated sound and image files into binary can be found here.