This performance is a three-part, multimedia “future museum” in which an AI curator guides audiences—imagined as tourists from a distant future—through the ruins of our present.

Goal:

The performance asks what it means to remember—and misremember—our own time from the vantage point of an imagined future. Its purpose is to stage the present as a ruin: to treat everyday objects, habits, and media as archaeological fragments that expose how colonialism, capitalism, climate catastrophe, and gendered/queer violence are woven into ordinary life. By using an AI museum guide that glitches, misreads artifacts, and fails to reconstruct a “complete” history, the piece questions who holds the archive, whose stories are lost, and why fantasies of perfect technological memory are themselves violent and incomplete. At the same time, the work invites audiences to become active participants rather than passive spectators: through the donation of handwritten “memory cards,” they help build an evolving, collective archive that acknowledges gaps, errors, and silences. The performance ultimately aims to unsettle institutional authority of the museum and professional narratives, foreground invisible and marginalized knowledges, and open space to imagine different futures from the ruins of the present.

Scene Breakdown:

The work is set in an underground tomb that houses the “Pre‑AI Age Civilization Exhibition, 2000–2025.” In Act I, the AI welcomes visitors with a cool, professional tone, then begins a tour of misread artifacts: smartphones become “Prayer Machines,” coffee mugs “Sacred Cups” filled with productivity potions, laptops “Labor Machines,” alcohol a “Truth Serum,” soil an “Uncontaminated Magic Powder,” printed books endangered relics, cameras “Time Capture Machines,” and even snow preserved as a synthetic replica. Each label combines pseudo-scientific authority with absurd misinterpretation, exposing histories of colonialism, capitalism, climate collapse, and gendered beauty rituals while revealing how much the future fails to understand about everyday life.

Act II shifts from static exhibition to live “Historical Reconstruction Project.” As the AI continues narrating, it attempts to simulate a normal day in snow-covered Chicagoland—an Indigenous land now colonized as the United States. A clock races from morning to night with flickering images of commuting, eating, scrolling, partying, and forgetting. The AI explains that AI was originally invented to compensate for humans’ finite knowledge and imperfect memory, and claims that, with enough data, it can finally synthesize a complete, optimal history. But the simulation begins to glitch. War, genocide, and ecological tipping points appear only as brief, unstable flashes—always “somewhere else,” always outside the frame of daily routines. The AI insists that humans could never live fully while knowing everything, yet also insists that its own digital memory is objective. When a human performer interrupts to ask, “What about what was never recorded?” the system spirals into an ontological crisis, repeating “You are an error” before the screen breaks and a neutral institutional voice apologizes for the malfunction.

Act III turns that failure into an invitation. Quoting Chekhov’s bleak prophecy that future generations will despise us yet perhaps learn how to be happy, the piece asks what kind of future might actually look back at our time—and who gets to write that history. The tour guide, with the sound of Michael Jackson’s We are the world song, asks the audience to participate in repairing its archive. Instead of donating money, spectators are invited to donate memories of “what happened after 2025” on blank “history archive cards.” These handwritten fragments—mundane routines, political events, private griefs, speculative futures—are collected in a donation box as an evolving archive that may appear in future iterations of the work.

In this final gesture, the piece shifts from satire to collective authorship: a speculative museum that not only critiques how institutions, algorithms, and states produce history, but also experiments with how ordinary people might insist on their own small, fragile traces in the face of forgetting, erasure, and technological overconfidence.