Twenty Plots 
For Things To Come

Heman Chong & Anthony Marcellini

For optimal viewing set your browser to full screen mode.

We began by imagining the future. How an object or a situation, which we may presently consider conventional and commonplace, has changed either through augmentation, erasure or reduction. And how, through these processes, things have turned the world and our everyday existence into something completely different. 

We started writing. 

Individually, we came up with 10 plots or scenarios of future situations based on these processes.

We looked at images, images of artifacts, from online collections of science and technology museums all around the world, and selected hundreds of images from their collections. Because these museums collect objects to investigate the development of animals, plants, ecosystems, geology, climatology and humans, they serve both to chronicle the past as well as envision the future of our world.

A film is generated from a program that links to these images and randomizes them, playing them at different intervals. A voiceover reads each of the twenty plots, playing them back in random order creating a series of scenes that are always different, in a never-ending film. The film is presented in galleries and infinitely on this website until all the links are dead.

Voice : Robert Pierson
Programming : John Weir 

Twenty Plots For Things To Come was commissioned for 'Dissident Futures' at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (Oct 18, 2013 –Jan 26, 2014).

Back to the artwork