Past Perfect
Yesterday, archived on demand
- Period
- 2013
- Status
- Complete / Archived
- Form
- Design fiction / participatory memory archive
The project
Past Perfect was a 2013 design-fiction project developed with Jae Minard, Lauren McCarthy, Scott Rashap, Barak Ziv, and Paul Porter. It began with a quasi-fictitious Craigslist service offering to preserve what happened yesterday. Respondents described one day; selected memories became four-minute films and the first entries in a prototype participatory archive, organized through moods, people, places, and objects.
The larger proposal imagined people contributing memories, filmmakers interpreting them, and sentiment analysis mapping the archive’s shifting moods.
We wanted the fictional service to have a real production process. We interviewed respondents about one day and reenacted selected recollections as short films.
A memory passed through our questions, a performer, a camera, and the archive's tags. We kept the discrepancies among those versions.
Tragically the site has expired.
What others saw
My role
I worked as experimental cinematographer with Jae Minard, Lauren McCarthy, Scott Rashap, Barak Ziv, and Paul Porter. We developed Past Perfect during the Tribeca Film Institute’s 2013 Tribeca Hacks.
Selected credits
- Alexander Porter
- Experimental Cinematographer
- Barak Ziv
- Collaborator
- Jae Minard
- Collaborator
- Lauren McCarthy
- Collaborator
- Paul Porter
- Collaborator
- Scott Rashap
- Collaborator