> By storing data nature’s way, in the DNA of plants, this work discusses the potential for truly green, carbon absorbing data storage, owned by the public rather than monopolistic corporations.
Another art project, not necessarily reality anytime soon, but I love this as an idea and a provocation.
I skew a little anti-GMO, but in my case strictly for IP reasons. For me to want to “grow my own cloud” I’d insist on all the biotechnologies in use being nonproprietary. Perhaps that’s overkill, as I don’t (because in practical terms I can’t) insist on the hardware layer of my computing systems being out of patent, but when it comes to GMO’s, the code is patented, and that’s the (whole, in my case) problem. On the upside, it would be holographic data storage, sort of like USENET, but not as dispersed. More like a massively redundant RAID, perhaps. But the organism will die at some point, so you’d still want to do backups, which I assume would take the form of well-preserved tissue samples, or well-preserved seeds, and it would be very important to me that that’s not illegal, and is royalty-free. Perhaps the host plant should be something that spontaneously self-clones, like strawberries (yum!). Be aware that viruses (literal viruses) WILL contaminate backups.