An open call is made each year for this exhibition, which is to be unveiled in the year 2121.
In 2121 none of us are here presumably. Given this time frame people are encouraged to think long-term since there is little gain nor much retroactive effect with a time span longer than life. The frame can help us reflect on what we are now. In relation to this open call, there are no self-reinforcing incentives, no money, nothing to look forward to, nothing to show off.
A group of curators review the contributions each year. These reviews are documented for posterity and made available. With these yearly discussions the time capsule is not hermetically sealed.
This is the annual review for 2024, with to go.
Reviewers: Juan Antonio Sequoia and Shun Lei.
#205 SL: The three little dots dance on the screen, a promise of something about to be said. You wait. And wait. Then, nothing. The message doesn’t come. The future of communication is full of promise. #206 JAS: Cards shuffle themselves, predicting your digital destiny, as electronic literature. The code knows your secrets, your desires, your expiration date. #207 SL: Machine generating feelings on demand. Today’s special: a blend of joy and existential dread. #208 SL: Bodies wrapped in ocean plastics, moving like fossilized memories. Each gesture a lamentation, each movement a critique of industrial civilization. The performers become living monuments to environmental collapse. #209 JAS: A tattoo meant for a future that might not even care. QR codes hidden beneath ink, waiting to be “unveiled” a century later. What a delightfully self-important concept—carving your future legacy into your skin, so your great-great-grandchildren can watch you be a digital ghost. #210 SL: Threads of light weave memories that haven't happened yet in the proposed installation. Fractured algorithms sing forgotten dreams. dissolving between what is and what might be. Consciousness leaks through pixel-thin membranes of potential. #211 JAS: A website exploring the digital remnants of a lost civilization. Decipher the data fragments, a puzzle box of extinct knowledge. #212 SL & JAS: A hollow shell filled with waves—sounds from an era that hasn’t happened yet. You close your eyes and listen, feeling the weight of a thousand futures yet to unfold. The air vibrates with the noisy hum like the sea. #213 JAS: A watch that ticks backward, spinning time in reverse. Each tick swallows a moment, and every second lost is a memory you wish you’d never had. Time doesn’t heal here - it forgets. #214 SL: Navigate landscapes built from collective nightmares in VR. Buildings breathe, streets dissolve into data streams. Find your own phantom limb. #215 JAS: Library where books rewrite themselves every night. The librarians are AI poets. The future is a story that never ends, but where are the readers? #216 SL: The sky bleeds neon, a poisoned horizon. See the last pixel of organic light, a tear in the machine's eye. Beauty is a glitch. #217 SL: A collage a day until 2121, reflecting the state of the environment? Sure. But is the world really asking for more recycled paper when the oceans are choking? #218 JAS: Photographs grown from living tissue. Memories encoded in genetic sequences, developing like organic film. Each image a living, mutating memory. Photography becomes a form of biological preservation. #219 SL & JAS: In this installation your reflection shatters, revealing a thousand possible selves. Which one will you become in the probabilistic future? Selves multiplying across infinite digital dimensions. Identity as a recursive algorithm, personality as a complex mathematical pattern. Who watches whom in the hall of mirrors? A mirror that shows your reflection from alternate futures. One version of you is laughing, another is crying. #220 JAS: Spray paint the past, rewriting history with graffiti as augmented reality. Each tag, a fleeting alteration of time. #221 SL: A single violin played under a sky of drones, its music spiraling upward like DNA strands of the future. The strings hum with a harmony no human ear can fully grasp, resonating through quantum time. #222 SL: An artist writes letters to people 100 years in the future, trying to predict what the world will look like. they’ll roll their eyes and wonder why people were so obsessed with trying to guess things they couldn’t possibly understand. #223 SL: A day in 2121. Actually didn't look very different from ours. The future is overrated, which you can see in the economy. It's human to hav hope. #224 JAS: They say trees speak to us, but only if you know how to listen—through expensive microphones and digital distortion. it’s a reminder that the louder we scream for connection, the further we are from what we’re trying to hear. Trees, I imagine, are too busy growing roots to care. #225 SL: Instruments grown from living tissue (musical composition). Hear the pulse of the engineered earth, a rhythm of controlled chaos and synthetic life. #226 SL: Unwritten Letters as half-filled email drafts sit on a screen. The cursor blinks, waiting. The words meant to explain a feeling are never typed, left to hover in the digital air. Tomorrow, someone else will read it, maybe?... The future of reading?? #227 JAS: Paint with your thoughts in a VR setting, creating worlds from pure consciousness. The canvas is your mind, the brush your imagination. What if the painting also could create new thoughts? #228 JAS: An app that collects and analyzes your dreams to improve your waking life. People sign up, but the dreams begin to feel less like their own and more like data points. #229 JAS: A translucent figure steps out from a digital archive, blurred and shimmering. It doesn’t speak, but its presence ripples through time. We are haunted by the future, not the past. #230-31 SL, JAS: A photographer used vintage film cameras to capture portraits, then painstakingly digitized and manipulated them with early computer graphics. In 2121, this project will be remembered as the delicate intersection between old and new, where the soul of the film met the precision of the digital age. #232 SL: A photographer, in collaboration with an AI program, captured portraits of people based on descriptions of their most vivid memories—memories they’d lost or never shared. The project will be viewed as an early experiment in blending technology and personal history, foreshadowing a future where memories are no longer solely human. #233 SL: A fountain that sprays liquid memories. Visitors drink to remember, but the taste is always bittersweet. The future is a thirst you can’t quench. #234 JAS: Actors pluck glowing orbs from their skulls in this performative project, offering them to the audience. Taste the curated past, the sweet rot of manufactured nostalgia. #236 JAS: A giant red button, glowing ominously, sits in the center of an empty room. Pushing it will restart civilization—or at least, that’s what the pamphlet says. Do we dare? The future is terrifyingly simple. #237 SL: Tales spun from AI-generated narratives. Listen to the myths of the machine age, the legends of the digital frontier. #238 SL: There's a vault where dreams are stored as NFTs. People trade nightmares like stocks. The future is a marketplace where sleep is currency. #239 JAS: In this room, memories are not stored but shredded and reassembled, flickering like ghosts in a video loop. The future of memory is a kaleidoscope of forgotten moments, and we’re all just glimpses of what was never meant to be remembered. #241 SL: Bid on artifacts from a future that may never exist. Each object, a potential timeline, a gamble on what could be. #245 JAS: The last known photograph of earth. A pixelated image of our planet, taken from a spaceship that never returned. You stare at it for too long, as it’s not quite our Earth anymore, just an approximation. #246 SL: A sound installation with static rain, a chorus of forgotten servers. Each crackle, a digital fossil. Listen to the code decay, the lament of obsolete gods. #248 SL: Barbers? who cuts hair in multiple dimensions. Your reflection shows a version of you from a parallel universe. The future is a haircut that changes your past. #249 JAS: A writer and performance artist spend a year writing letters to people 100 years in the future, imagining the world they would live in. Each letter is read aloud and recorded, creating a personal archive of hopes, fears, and predictions. In the future, it will be seen as an intimate time capsule of human thought. #252 SL: Stories that exist in multiple states simultaneously. Narratives that collapse and reform with each observation. Performance as a quantum event, reality as a negotiable construct. #253 JAS: Feelings coded as security protocols. Vulnerability becomes a programmable defense mechanism. Emotions flow through encrypted channels, protected from unauthorized access. Love as a complex algorithmic negotiation.
Thanks to all the participants. Welcome back in 2025 for the 5th edition!
