Evidence of Deep Time: A Report on the Archaeology of the Future

I am playing the role of an archaeologist from the future.

This premise is not an escape from reality, but a methodology—by creating a cognitive distance, it allows the ‘present’ to become a ‘past’ that can be examined. My question is simple: if someone were to excavate our era ten thousand years from now, what would they find?

I am not predicting the future. I am diagnosing the present.

Four posters serve as the project’s visual manifesto, each corresponding to evidence on four scales: objects, bodies, behaviour, and nature. They extend an invitation to the viewer: the Anthropocene is becoming a geological stratum, and you are standing upon it.

I have compiled the core evidence into a double-volume publication. One volume documents ‘celebration’: the relics of technological civilisation—the durability of plastic, the efficiency of trade, the convenience of connection. The other documents ‘doubt’: the testimony of a geological trial—the cost of pollution, the transience of meaning, the silencing of nature. This is not a black-and-white choice, but the very complexity of the Anthropocene: we are simultaneously creators and destroyers, and the two cannot be separated.

I have produced two versions. One is an archive folder containing accordion-folded pages, preserving the raw state of field notes—unfixed, rearrangeable, and bearing the traces of the hand. The other is a hardback folio that opens from both ends to meet in the middle—like yin and yang, inseparable. The content is the same, but the context differs. It is like the diary and memoirs of the same person: both record the same events, but one is written ‘in the midst of happening’, the other ‘after the fact’ .

This is not the answer

This book is not the answer. It is the printed form of the question.

I am not a future archaeologist. I am someone standing in the present, asking myself, ‘What are we leaving behind?’ As I created this book, I continued to produce the evidence contained within it. I cannot pretend to stand on the outside.

Deep Time will not end. But at the very least, I no longer pretend there is no problem.