Newark, Delaware, Tuesday 9th December, 2025: SPhotonix, the pioneers of 5D Memory Crystal technology, has preserved the unique Eon Ark Time Capsule produced by Sounds Fun in partnership with the Berggruen Institute. The capsule contains ‘conversations’ from people in 2024 and 2025 that people in the far distant future can interact with. Recorded online, the digital data has been femtoetched onto an SPhotonix 5D Optical Data Storage crystal preserving the conversations forever.

The Eon Ark Project was created on behalf of The Berggruen Institute by Sounds Fun to address a real cultural challenge: Current day human society is too focused on short term, urgent needs to address real, long-term important problems. This is evident in  political polarization and clear back-sliding on issues like climate change. Part of their Wunder Kamer initiative, the Eon Ark Project inspires people to think not just about the next hundred years, but the next million, encouraging an audience to adopt more long term, meaningful thinking.  

The individual Eon Ark is a durable glass object digitally preserving the personalities of thousands of contemporary humans, enabling dialogue with future generations. It started with an interactive digital experience featuring questions designed to elicit someone’s personality, creating a series of question-and-answer pairs. AI transforms these answers into interactive personal agents, based on these responses, allowing participants to engage with each other and real humans interested in the experiment, in the present day, and the distant future. The data is then femtoetched(™) into 5D crystals using proprietary technology by SPhotonix, ensuring almost indefinite preservation. Encased in protective vessels with multilingual instructions, the Eon Ark is designed for activation and recreation by future technology, facilitating potential conversations between humans separated by potentially eons. 

Commenting on this one-of-a-kind optical data storage project, SPhotonix CEO, Ilya Kazansky, said:

“This partnership pushes the boundaries of possibility in how our future selves, our future families can interact with us from the current year, generation we are in. How better can today’s cultural shifts and patterns, our thoughts and feelings, our concerns and happiness be transferred, shared and interacted with, than through Sounds Fun’s Eon Ark project? It is a truly legacy project that deserves to be preserved so that in eons of time, the capsule can be discovered and used. It’s a mind blowing project to be a part of and our technology is facilitating future use thousands of years from now.

Iain Thomas, Co-Founder of Sounds Fun added: 

“Sounds Fun firmly believe in creating work that could only be made today for the very first time, and SPhotonix are the heralds of the future of storage and potentially an entirely new kind of time capsule, on a scale which is almost impossible to imagine, so it only made sense to come to them with this partnership. We’re absolutely blown away by the possibilities and can’t stop thinking about what’s next.” 

SPhotonix invented the optical data storage device, sometimes known as the Superman Crystal, to sustainably store and preserve data for billions of years. Developed by Prof. Peter Kazansky, the patented FemtoEtch™️ technology uses nano lasering to store up to 270 TB data into the layers of a 5 inch quartz crystal. SPhotonix’s technology has been featured in the recent Mission Impossible finale, it has also been used by Good Old Games (GOG) to preserve the iconic video game Heroes of Might and Magic 3 as well as storing the human genome.