Photos capturing legendary moments of world-famous bands were archived on piqlFilm

Photographer Katarína Benzová

Katarína Benzová started as a model, but later discovered her passion on the other side of the lens. The photographer’s career started on a world-famous Guns N ‘Roses concert, who approached her with an offer to become their photographer. For the tenth year in a row, she has been touring with them and capturing all the unique moments with her camera. The collaboration with the band enabled several possibilities and currently Katarína accompanies not only them but also bands such as Aerosmith, KISS, AC/DC or Def Leppard.

What are the origins and developments of the cooperation between Katarína Benzová and Piql?

Katarína Benzová: “Mr. Hodinka, the CEO of Piql Slovakia, contacted me after seeing my interview in Forbes. He was interested in my work and offered me cooperation within the piqlFilm-GO project, which is co-financed by the European Union Framework Horizon 2020 programme. So far, I have saved my work on external hard disks or cloud storage. Electronic storage can be erased with a single careless click, data overwriting, password theft or hardware failure. It has already happened to me that my data was lost, could not be saved when the disk was damaged, or another person accidentally deleted it from the cloud storage. When Piql explained to me the principles of the piqlFilm storage medium, I was thrilled and agreed to cooperate without hesitation. As a fan of black and white old school photography, I like it when photograph serves as a carrier of information and memories in its basic form. I´m also thrilled to watch the popularity of Polaroids and film photography, so it’s great to keep the data in this way. ”

What type of Katarina's content was stored on piqlFilm and how did the mutual cooperation take place?

Katarína Benzová: “On piqlFilm we have saved exactly that content, which I want to pass on to future generations. This is most of my work over the last ten years, containing many legendary moments of world-famous bands. I was told that piqlFilm is not a physically portable medium and it has no additional moving parts like an external hard drive, with which I don´t have a good experience. Its durability is long and their collaboration with AWA (Arctic World Archive is a facility for data preservation in Svalbard, Norway, operated by the Norwegian companies Piql and the state-owned Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani) is amazing. I am very pleased that next year the AWA storage will be richer thanks to my data being stored there. Storing data in this way is secure and traceable in the future. It is the use of non-migratory digital film technology. By recording data in a digital format that is readable by a computer and at the same time a visual format readable by the human eye, visual memories and recordings of unique (and not only musical) moments are preserved. ”

The collaboration with photographer Katarína Benzová is part of the piqlFilm-GO project within the EU Framework Horizon 2020 programme.

For more information on data archiving, visit www.piql.sk. If you are interested in archiving or long term preservation of your data, you can also contact us at +421 903 700 954 or ladislav.hodinka@piql.sk

Team Piql Slovakia