Archive For / In the Future

Abstract

When we visit museums, we see reconstructions of ancient sites that speak more about why we interpret them this way rather than how they really looked. We build models about an ancient places that we have never been by interpreting history through our own biased lens, imagining their daily lives as if they lived with our own social customs. Our interpretations of the distant past are wrought with speculation and imagination, because every time we bring that record up from memory, we reinterpret them anew in the context of our own biases today. Is this also true for how the future will interpret us? Will they look at us from the lens of a distant future that no longer understands us for who we are today? Will they even speak the same language as us, but rather diverge in motives and priorities so radically that they will fail to recognize us? To show the need for preserving memories and interpretations as part of a collective heritage for the future, we created a physical installation with robot arm that serves as an archive from the future that attempts to remember our present. We used ChatGPT to create personas from history and converted their conversational snippets into a non-human language of the future in the form of robotic movements. The robot has a virtual existence in VRChat, where visitors can engage with the physical archive presence online, showing how the future can choose to remember us through an imagined interactive world living online. This work explores how hybrid physical-digital presence can illustrate our precarious interpretations of the past and present, inspiring us to preserve intangible forms of our current heritage in consideration for continuously changing customs of the future.