There seems to be an urge to re-engage with heritage and memories, not only as of the “source” of the present condition but, paradoxically, as an instrument for futuristic imaginations. In this Open Set programme, the leading questions were: How can we de-mystify our historical conventions, re-contextualise our previous experience, give this experience new meaning based on present conditions, and transform it for the future? How to preserve the traces of the past and make sense of them in the digital age? Whether it be social network platforms, carefully curated collections, or state archives, how we archive and what we archive are unavoidable decisions that will determine our memory.

The context of the programme was the Dutch media archive — The Netherlands Archive of Sound and Vision. This is one of the largest European collections of broadcasts, TV programmes, online videos, websites, amateur movies, advertising, and video games.1  Memories of the Future brought together a group of practitioners and researchers from the humanities and the arts to examine how they relate to the archive as an institution, an algorithmic environment, and to the archival material itself. This Open Set group consisted of emerging and established designers, filmmakers, photographers, artists, and scholars in the fields of social sciences, preservation, media, and computational science.
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From their positions as visual makers and thinkers, the programme’s participants encountered the archive from their own social standpoints, cultural and professional backgrounds, and subjective perspectives. They chased the ghosts and myths, conventions and icons, forgotten heroes and invisible voices in the archive, in order to show the structures and the power of the narratives living inside it.

Through a series of working sessions, lectures and peer-led discussions, the Memories of the Future curriculum focused on the research aspects of creative practices (design and applied arts) while deliberately slowing down their decision-making processes. In other words, de-strategising creative approaches and experimenting with how these can interrelate with other discourses, strategies and practices of knowledge production (mainly with academic research). In this process of tuning different research approaches, we were interested in the conditions and grounds in which hybrid methodologies and lexicons can occur.

The final presentation of the programme took place at the Sound and Vision Institute, in the form of a display and symposium titled Fluid Memory.

The Design Curating and Writing master programme (Design Academy Eindhoven) engaged with the Memories of the Future programme in order to reveal to the public at large the themes and ideas that emerged during Memories of the Future around the notion of archiving. The result was published in the thematic (online) edition of Open Set Reader.