The nickel-plate book we’re making is unlike any other book you’ve seen. We’ve partnered with Norsam Technologies and Los Alamos Laboratories to utilize a special ion-etching process, capable of printing tens of thousands of pages onto a 2" × 2" plate.

The process does not produce “data.” It is not like a CD. It is not a composition of 0's and 1's representing the information. It is the information itself. The nickel plate is a medium, not media. And everything printed on the plate will be readable with an optical microscope.

The nickel plates have an estimated life span of 10,000 years. They’re fire resistant. They deal well with salt water. And because they’re printed with our pictures and words — assuming contemporary language is decipherable in the future — anyone who finds this and has access to fairly elementary technology (an optical microscope) will be able to read our thoughts and experiences as mapped to city and place.

We’re calling the online and nickel-plate archives the Hitotoki Archives. Hi.co was descendent from a project called Hitotoki that began in 2007. Hitotoki means “one” (hito) and “moment” (toki) in Japanese, which is precisely what we’ve been collecting with Hi.co: moments big and small. We shortened the name to Hi to make it more universally accessible to anyone around the world with a smartphone, for whom deciphering “Hitotoki” might have been too confusing.

The Hitotoki Archives have antecedents in other projects. To name a few: There is the Voyager Golden Record from 1977, as well as the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Disc from 2006, and Trevor Paglen’s 2012 The Last Pictures project.