How to send messages to the future? What messages should or should not be sent? Is someone trying to send us messages from the past but we are not listening? Some attempts have been made to send warning messages of our nuclear waste 100.000 years to the future but the task seem to be impossible.
In this workshop, we take more playful approach and try to map various scenarios for knowledge transfer over different timespans, from 10 seconds to thousands of years - distilled bits of our culture, maybe poems, maybe self-executable code, maybe recipies of our food, maybe rules of our games.
Michael Madsens documentary “Into Eternity”(2010) addresses the challenges of marking a nuclear waste repository hidden 500 meters under Finnish bedrock as dangerous for next 100.000 years. Same “nuclear semiotics” challenge was originally addressed on 10.000 year timescale with Human Interference Task Force on Yucca Mountain repository project in 1980’s. How do you send a simple message of: “Danger - keep away’ that far ahead in the future when the recipients likely represent completely different cultures, languages with unkown sets of symbols? This challenge has inspired artists, semioticians and physicists to come up with several solutions from inpassable landscape art to the incredible raycat solution.
Timecapsules was a workshop commision by Dimension Plus Taipei for Playaround2018 workshop in Taipei, October 2018
(work on progress)