There are quite interesting artworks that reflect on humans strong fear to become meaningless in the future, rather because next generations will misunderstand our motivations or because those motivations will completely loose sense in a new context. The contemporary problem of technology obsolescence adds another layer to the ‘retrieval of meaning’ issue: we are not sure if our recordings will be accessible.

(It is impossible for me not to mention at this point the play Krapp’s Last Tape, Samuel Becket, 1958, and its strong reflection on meaning, archiving, technology and time).

We have just experienced the ambiguity of the past, and also the difficulty to decode old mediums. We rebuild memories and actualize stories, and we know that imagination plays a central role in the re-enactment of memory.

Pau Waelder has recently called my attention to one of those artistic projects that addresses the question of meaning in a call for an explicit present-future conversation: Future Library (2014-2014) by Katie Paterson.

Paterson has planted one thousand trees in a forest outside Oslo (Norway), in order to supply enough paper to publish a special anthology of books, which are being written from now on up to the anthology release in 2114.

Katie Paterson express in the projects’ webpage:

Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for one hundred year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future.

Future Library think itself in terms of “interconnectedness” of living things and humans now and still to come. As a counterpoint of a culture described by the artist as a one that “think in short bursts of time”, the timescale of her project looks to transcend the immediate present. Nevertheless, the project focus on environmental and ecological issues, the question of ‘how our contemporary concerns will matter in the future’, is still there.