Erica Esserman

Future Earth

Future Earth is meant to inspire participants to travel within the next year. Participants are asked to decide on a location they would like to visit within the next year, and to set an intention to follow through with their desire. The  project  will illuminate the goals and intentions of the participants in order to create a visual data representation of the locations of the inhabitants of the earth in the future. This project is an experiment in participants actively creating future data in the moment of participating in the project. 

The project draws on a similar idea from Natalie Jeremijenko, Live Wire, 1995, in that the more “traffic” in a specific location, the more “wiggly,” or in this case bright, the location will be.  Future Earth differs however in that instead of representing live data, it represents future data. This project also alludes to the globalization of Info-Aesthetics as described in Lev Manovich’s, “Introduction to Info-Aesthetics.” This installation also nods to Lynn Hershman’s exploration of interactivity and the relationship between real and virtual worlds through this exploration of the participant’s intentions as a virtual space of the future versus the actuality of the future. 

Project Type: Participatory Installation

Date: 2017

Role: Independent Project

Technology: AutoCAD

Location: University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States