Future Library

The beauty of a process piece is the focus on creation, and at our core that is what sets humans apart from other living creatures on earth. What’s so wonderful about documenting a creation process, whether it is through the medium of film or through sound alone, is a compound effect. One creative piece inspires another and the potency of that creative process is given room to grow, much like a tree in the forest. This idea is evident in the short documentary, “The Smokehouse”. With each appropriately composed shot of the wood as he carved, we were watching a communication between two artistic works. The first being that of the woodwork and the second being the medium of film. This collaboration of artistic mediums illustrates a macro-process, similar to our audio documentation of “Future Library,” in which two processes compound and communicate. As art begins to communicate with art, it has a better chance to influence the people who come in contact with it and in doing so it has a better chance to stand the test of time. This idea of artistic communication and time is something that we wanted to portray as we started on this work.

The idea of Future Library is timeless, growing like tree roots into the past, rooted in the future, and growing upwards towards the future. The link between a tree and a book and man is as old as the written word itself, leading up to the moment where we are always faithfully writing books for a near-future audience, but now we are looking further into the future. Future Library will contain books that will not be read for a century, and authors such as Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell who are contributing to the project must faithfully write for an audience that may not even exist.

Rachel first stumbled upon the idea of “Future Library” as she was scouring a artistic journal publication for ideas. The idea stood out to her because it seemed like a simple time capsule, but it was actually complex: filled with questions and implications about the future of humanity, libraries, forests, and books. The artist, Katie Paterson, believes that these things are interconnected. She got the idea for Future Library when she thoughtfully compared tree rings to chapters of a book. We particularly liked the idea of trees growing as a book was growing, since their fate is interconnected. We wanted to reflect that in our process piece by juxtaposing the forest sounds with typewriting. We also decided that since the idea behind this process holds equal weight to the process itself, we wanted to avoid following a strictly linear path. We introduce the process piece with a quote from Fahrenheit 451, a book all too appropriate for this project. This introduces our theme, then we introduce our forest, a steady presence throughout the piece. The forest is the only component of this process that will be present in an interactable way in our lifetime, so we kept it throughout. We also thought forests and libraries to be very similar, so we juxtaposed them in the beginning with the audio of turning pages and stacking books.

Finally, we wanted to end the project with the theme of the unknown future. We included a clip of a news reel with no real news to introduce the idea of a century where anything could happen. Then, we end with a quote from T.S. Eliot: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”