These 100 Ceramic Statues Depict The People Who Are Helping To Archive The Internet

Jason Scott/Wikimedia Commons

The Internet Archive, which is based in the Richmond District in San Francisco, is a nonprofit organization that provides permanent storage and free access to music, websites, moving images and millions of public-domain books.

For example, the Wayback Machine, which is its Web archive, contains more than 480 billion images of websites at the time of this writing. It has archived more than 10 petabytes of data.

In a way, it's commemorating the Internet, since its inception in 1996. And it's also found a way to commemorate its researchers and archivists.

Eddie Codel/FlickrAaron Swartz's statue

The Archive commissioned a fine arts sculptor named Nuala Creed to make statues representing people who have dedicated at least three years of service to the Internet Archive.

To date, Creed has made 100 statues, and they reside in the Great Room at the Archive and are scattered among the old church pews.

The Internet Archive's founder, computer engineer Brewster Kahle, was inspired to start the project after he went on a trip to China and saw the terracotta warriors, which depict the armies of the first emperor of China.

Creed says that she works from photographs of the people, and a brief statement about their interests. The statues are also holding items, such as coffee cups, books and cellphones.

The statue for Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit who committed suicide in 2013, is holding a computer and is wearing an Electronic Frontier Foundation T-shirt. The statue was unveiled on what would have been his 27th birthday.