Time Capsule

tl;dr: Create a Time Capsule to be opened in 25 years. Identify the objects you would include in this Time Capsule and reflection on your choices in under 2 hours.

Brief and Goals

In this module, we’ll consider how memory is distributed and entwined with material objects. In this exercise you’ll take cues from the work of Daniela Petrelli, and explore the objects that matter to you. You’ll repeat the main exercise in a study she conducted and prepare a time capsule of objects. The authors note:

A time-capsule is a way of leaving traces of our life for ourselves or others to discover in the future. It is an intriguing idea that captured the imagination of many, including artist Andy Warhol who assembled 370 such boxes in 13 years. It has been used in educational settings, community and art projects.

In this study, “Making history: intentional capture of future memories”, ten families navigate objects in their homes and lives to recount their present to their future selves by creating time capsules to be opened in 25. In so doing this allowed them to ask questions like:

• What do people want to remember in the long-term? Are they more interested in people or experiences? Do they emphasise important events or more mundane aspects of everyday life?
• What types of objects are chosen as long-term memory cues? Are these representational objects, e.g. photographs, theatre tickets, or are they more symbolic, e.g. a child’s first tooth or pair of socks?
• Why do people want to remember? Do they want to recall facts about their past, to reminisce or to preserve significant objects from their lives?
• How is remembering going to happen? Is the time- capsule intended to support veridical recall of events as lifelogging suggests? Or will it function as a set of more fragmentary cues for the re-construction of meaning in the recall context, as work on autobiographical and collective memory claims?

As part of this exercise, you’ll explore these questions first hand by repeating the exercise yourself.

Brief: Build a time capsule of a small number of your objects to by opened by your future self in 25 years.

Note This is a warmup exercise and you should spend around 2 hours on this exercise.

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

• Develop your awareness of material culture and the means by which physical artefacts represent memories;
• Explore the kinds of experiences you find signifance and wish to recalling in the long-term; and
• Examine the kinds of cues and proxys that objects offer to memory and recall.

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver three things for this warm up exercise:

1. Time Capsule: Delivered with digital documentation (photographs) on Slack or bring to class
2. Narrative: A short description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used to translate the work
3. Reflection: A reflection on outcome, and comparision to findings of the Petrelli paper discussed in class.

The narrative and reflection should be approx 150-200 words (max.)

Share your outcomes as a post on the #projects channel of on Slack.