Creating Future Memory

This project is designed to find and foster innovative methods for preserving digitally-mediated lived experience.

This five year project, ‘Creating Future Memories,’ is a citizen-focused effort to identify and foster ongoing and new creative methods of regaining control of the ‘big data’ we regularly produce in our everyday lives. As contemporary societies become more saturated in digital and social media, it takes time and effort to track our own data, much less curate it in ways that might make sense for our grandchildren. This international project is directed by Annette Markham as part of the larger Future Making Consortium. It is supported by the Department of Information Studies and the Cultural Transformations Research Unit at Aarhus University. Beginning in 2016, Creating Future Memories is hosting a series of experimental workshops for citizens to think about what personal data is being collected by large corporations like Google and Facebook, and how this data is archived, packaged, and recycled back to us as if it represents the totality of our lives.This five year project is designed to find and foster innovative methods for preserving digitally-mediated lived experience of 21st Century events. Using interventionist and action research research design, it addresses urgent concerns about regaining control of our future cultural histories. The project was awarded 2.5 million DKK in startup funds by the Aarhus University Research Foundation.

Latest Updates

Imaging Future Making and MoRM

by Annette Markham | Jun 19, 2017

MoRM lives within the larger umbrella (or cloud?) of Future Making. Here’s a possible way of visualizing this larger effort.

Speculative Fiction and Internet of Things: A workshop/experiment

by Annette Markham | May 12, 2017

This is the first of a series of methodology experiments to explore how certain questions or provocative statements elicit critical analysis around the socio-technical characteristics or impact of so-called “Internet of Things.”

Remembering and Forgetting at Counterplay 2017: MoRM Returns

by Annette Markham | Mar 26, 2017

This participatory performance and exhibition invites you to think about the process of making memories, to play around with the idea that remembering and forgetting are not always distinct. We ask participants to contribute something they’d like to forget and walk them through a process of dis-remembering, de-archiving, and dis-preserving.

Creating Future Memories Workshop at Dokk1

by Annette Markham | Mar 5, 2017

What happens when you throw a dozen intense, creative, and accomplished professionals in a room together to build an exhibition on ‘creating future memories’ in 24 hours? This workshop/sprint was conducted as part of a collaboration between the Future Making Research Consortium and the CounterPlay festival. Led by Annette Markham, Professor of Information Studies at Aarhus University.

The politics and ethics of curating others’ memories

by Annette Markham | Feb 20, 2017

Brief reflections on the power of the curation process, as it inevitably carries our own moral codes, furthering our particular ethics. The only way through this tangle is to understand that the point of all of this is not to create The Museum but to engage citizens in a process through which they can think about their own memory-making tendencies.

Building a conceptual frame for MoRM

by Dalida Maria | Feb 20, 2017

Our everyday lives are shot through with questions of politics and history; and now perhaps we need to rethink the Museum’s purpose as providing the space for framing and reflection of each of our relative positions to these larger questions. How, then, to refine our prompt, our approach generally, and develop the role of Museum staff, all towards greater social inquiry and political discovery?