Audio Installation, 2026

Artist: Julian Pixel Schmiederer

Archival audio from Letters to the Unborn (1959), courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). © Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Dear friend of the future, […] when you open [this letter], unless I am very wrong, letter writing will be as outmoded as speech.”

Australian journalist Max Lamshed wrote this in 1959 in a letter addressed to the early 21st century. He was one of 19 Australian journalists, scientists, reverends, and writers asked to write letters to future generations as part of the ABC project “Letters to the Unborn” in the late 1950s. In addition to the disappearance of speech, they speculated about other –sometimes absurd – developments, hardly any of which proofed to be right.

In “Archive of a Past Future”, past conceptions of the future encounter present reality. Visitors are given umbrellas equipped with speakers, each of which plays one letter – one vision of the future – immersing them in a future that is long gone. When several umbrellas come together, they create a moving archive of bizarre descriptions of a future that is now our present.